What do you use and recommend? What are you using that you don't like and would like recommendations on better alternatives?
If my website has only static content, I prefer to have a simple dedicated server on OVH[1] with Amazon CloudFront[2] as CDN. It is very cheap and provide a very service wordwide with the CDN. Amazon CloudFront is better than Amazon S3 for a worldwide scenario since your static files are always close to your users. Note that you must directly reference your Cloudfront instance in your DNS to avoid any SPOF.
When my website has some dynamic content, it is another story. I use Amazon RDS[3] as Database with a Multi-AZ Deployments. For the CPU I use different amazon EC2[4] instances in the region that provide the best latency for my users (in general us-east since I want good performances in North America and Europe). I then use Amazon CloudFront CDN[2] to deliver the static content of my website.
In any case, I use Route 53[5] as DNS.
[1] http://www.ovh.com/us/dedicated-servers/
[2] http://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/
[3] http://aws.amazon.com/rds/
* I'm hosting with a VPS on Dreamhost[2] at $9.95/month which I find very expensive for such a completely mediocre service. I'm bothered by hosts trying to simplify the hosting process with endless panels and management tools that contort the hosting process into something more confusing instead of making it simpler. I've been using Heroku for projects and would like to use it for my personal site but I'm not sure if that is what Heroku was designed for really.
* I'm operating almost entirely from my OS X laptop now and FTP files to my server through FTPzilla. It works but every time I fire up FTPzilla I can't help but feel like there is an easier and smarter way to do all of this.
* I'm using Namecheap[3] for domains and like it mainly because using GoDaddy in the past has made anything better feel like a god send. A friend started managing a few domains with me on DNSimple[4] recently and I think its a great resource.
[1] - http://octopress.org/
[2] - http://dreamhost.com/
[3] - http://www.namecheap.com/
[4] - https://dnsimple.com/
* Route 53[2] for DNS
* Jekyll[3] for managing content
* S3[4] for hosting
I do all my development on my Macbook Pro, with vim. Then I use s3cmd[5] to push the static files up to S3.
[1] - http://www.namecheap.com/
[2] - http://aws.amazon.com/route53/
[3] - https://github.com/mojombo/jekyll
[4] - http://aws.amazon.com/s3/
[5] - http://s3tools.org/s3cmd
I do site admin with key based ssh/scp and nothing else. The key has a passphrase, and my Ubuntu desktop manages the passphrase nicely.
I don't like that I tried to leverage django's out of the box admin module too heavily; I should have written (or reused?) a small app for site management.
I'll be moving to a lightweight python framework, like bottle or flask, for the next incarnation. The framework will manage creation of static content (posts and comments) and everything will be served as static as much as possible.
Workflow to get a static site online:
git clone pr0d:www/skeleton-jekyll
cd skeleton-jekyll/jekylldocs
[... add/edit files here ...]
git add .
git commit -m "Initial commit."
git remote add example pr0d:www/example.com
git push example master
As for domains, I love http://iwantmyname.com