[Andrew Schreiber]

John, I have to disagree with you, while I think Linux servers are wonderful Microsoft servers are also quite handy if you know how to set them up. Where I work we have servers that have not had a minute of unscheduled down time in a year. When we do have downtime it is mostly for upgrades (hardware and software) and those times are known over a month in advance.

My suggestion, before paying for a server use XAMP (google it) to test out your code on a local machine. Depending on what language you want to do I would suggest different software. If you want to use .Net Visual Studio is the recommended app. For PHP development I would recommend notepad++ (or your code editor of choice) As for HTML development, notepad++ again is my developer of choice on Windows. On OS X I use Textmate for all HTML/PHP development.

Only once you have learned the basic skills would I rent space on a server and buy a domain name. No point to be paying for it to be sitting out there unused.