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So much depends on what level of service you want and need, how easy it is to get tech support, etc. So your question seems straightforward, but it's really very complex -- something like "What is the best car?" There just no easy answer.
I'd like to caution against this thread becoming a listing of links to web hosts. It's probably more helpful for people to talk about what they look for in a good host.
MS servers also seem more expensive to upkeep, and are more prone to security holes it seems, for a variety of reasons outlined in other WMW threads, and is beside the point here.
Apache/Free-BSD is what our host uses - one of the largest US based public host companies. Generally, you have much more freedom with these systems if you are on a shared host. There is much more open source applications available, usually in development, but very usable and always being imporved due to the nature of open source. They generally support Perl better, and hackers like us. And they are generally cheaper.
We changed servers from a MS host, because we got sick of them telling us that Perl was a dinosaur, that they couldnt support Berkeley DBFORM databases for example, that they didnt like PHP, and that we really had to move to using proprietary systems such as Access databases, Cold Fusion, etc, (all of which came with an extra cost of course!) Now things are much smoother.
I have been running Perl for quite some time on my NT server (with only one annoying oddity related to the screen saver!)and support it just fine.
I also recently downlaoded MySql which looks like a wonderful way to avoid MSSQL for a powerful database.
I'm not up on PHP, but we do run ASP in both VB script and Javascript.
For a hosting solution I always stayed away from NT because I didn't understand how to run Perl on it. Now that I do, I almost like NT better (from the administration point of view).
But there are so many variables to consider.
