Suppose I want to host some web-service - a bunch of code that will accept HTTP requests, do something useful and serve results as web pages.
AFAIK there're two options. I could buy a server and host it at my office/home/whatever or at a colocation facility. Or I could rent a virtual machine in some public cloud service like Amazon EC2 or Windows Azure.
Are there any other options? What are they?
You want to host a website. You can own a server, buy an IP off your provider that's static, then redirect your DNS to your office/home/etc. and run it there. You can buy a server and stick it in a colo and rent their bnadwidth and point your domain there. You can rent a server at a hosting site and point your DNS there. You can rent a "cloud" machine and point your service there. You can bribe a friend to host it at his or her own site.
What exactly are you trying to do or want to do that doesn't involve either buying a server or renting a server? That kind of limits what you're going to be able to do without one of those two things.
You can also take a look at Google App Engine. It just runs code for people - Google take care of the rest, the scaling, the bandwidth, pretty much everything.
You cant rent a dedicated server from $50/month upwards. With or without management or monitoring.
You can rent a VPS from $20 upwards. Not recommended.
You can rent a VPS with dedicated disks a bit more expensive.
You can rent web hotel space from $2/mth upwards.
You can rent space or virtual machines from Amazon. It's not too expensive before hitting traffic.
Your last option should be meddling with your own hardware at office or colocation. I bet also your time could be better spent elsewhere. The colo price is similar to dedicated server and office cable is expensive and prone to disconnects.
Depending on technology - regular shared hosting.
A web service (assuming you use standards) can be hosted on any asp.net web host easily. Service hosting is part of the normal .NET runtime. The same for most other languages.
