VPS for a total Noob?

Amazon Web Services EC2. Best you can get, and free for a year for a micro instance. After that, $5-15/month, depending on whether you pay entirely month-by-month or pay some up front. Only catch is it's meant for enterprises and such, so it's not the easiest thing to use; it's just pure Linux.

If you want some of that Plesk/cPanel nonsense that mucks up your VPS, any consumer-oriented provider will do, but don't expect a stable site the moment some script kiddy comes along. Upside is you'll have a pretty-looking control panel; downside is it masks a downright disgusting backend.

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If you decide to do things on your own, Ubuntu would probably be the easiest Linux distribution to use, since it has the most documentation scattered about the internet. Always go 64-bit. You'll want what is called a "LAMP" stack--Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP. Ubuntu will do most of the setup for you--most popular distros will. You'll still need to mess with a few configuration files, especially if you're hosting multiple websites. For that, you'll need to research using Apache's "virtual host" feature. Ubuntu makes it easy: copy the file in /etc/apache2/sites-enabled; any additional files in that folder will automatically be loaded. Don't ever log in as "root"--a lot of hosts encourage that, but you'll end up with all sorts of permission problems, and any Linux expert will bop you over the head. EC2 takes care of creating a non-root account and disabling root for you. To connect to the server, you'll need to use something like PuTTY, which is a popular SSH client for Windows. Think remote desktop, but... text. Use WinSCP for file transfer; it uses SFTP over SSH, so no additional setup is required. Do not use FTP unless you fancy your server getting hacked. I'll spare you the lecture. (On your end, SFTP and FTP will appear basically the same.)

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P.S. If you want something similarly powerful to AWS but with a less daunting control panel, Azure is a good choice. Yes, even though it's by Microsoft, it does support Linux. You can get $150/month free credit if you apply to BizSpark as a startup and get accepted, along with a free MSDN subscription (read: all Microsoft software, free).

Thank you for a well thought out answer with some real information in it, I half expected to get one or two replies that said do it and one or two that said don't lol. I'm goona look into AWS and BizSpark right now.

DigitalOcean is good for noobs, they have a bunch of tutorials from beginner to advanced users, also they give you the best service at low price. I'm very happy with them and will not going anywhere.

If you wish to offer hosting to your clients, I'd recommend to get reseller hosting with SSH access (so you can play with Linux commands too or VPS with WHM/cPanel, as that has graphical user interface for easy management.

If you are interested in a VPS then give it a whirl. There are many good websites out there that will practically hold your hand through the process and give you tips and tricks as well. Don't let fear hold you back. Another good piece of advice is don't get ahead of yourself. Take it step by step or you risk performing actions that can destroy your data and that can be time consuming. Find a good mentor on an informative site and you will learn more about VPS than you imagined possible.

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