general high-traffic website building inquiry

Hi all.

I've been out of designing for a few years now, so I'm pretty out of touch. I'm thinking about launching a new website that will hopefully have a level of traffic on par with this one. What I want to know is basically:

1. what kind of hosting is required? Would it be a dedicated server, and what kind of performance parameters (bandwidth, space, etc) should I require? Does anybody have good experience with high-traffic hosting?

2. What would be a ballpark monthly cost for hosting? I know I can get hosting for a few dollars a month, but I hope to have a growing user base, and I don't want the site crashing, of course.

3. The last few sites I built were in ASP 3. Is that still viable for today's websites, or is it necessary to use ASP.NET or PHP (or whatever else)?

That's basically it. I know it sounds totally open-ended, but some rought ideas on 1 & 2 would be fine, and personal opinions on #3 are welcome.

I got into web work maybe three years ago and did asp.net - I ended up leaving that and started using jQuery library and making ajax calls to homegrown webmethods (still running under IIS - but I guess at this point anything could host it).

So my sites are perpetual - never leave the page - all ajax async calls to database and jQuery effortlessly re-draws whatever part of the dom is needed.

I really enjoy coding with jQuery a lot - took a while to master Javascript...

There are variations on what you can go to.
You can have a provided that will allows you to post data through a console.
You can have a provided that given you a virtual server to manipulate, viewing the server desktop.
You can have an actual server send to a company and have it run remotely.
You can also also host it in your own space with a Static IP.
I think the best option is a real server send to a hosting company but this is costly.
A second option would be to get a virtual server and add hardware(virtual) according to your needs.
The other 2 options are lower cost but you have to get 3-4 Static IP lines and plex them to much any company given speed.
If you have a 50-100$ budget per month i would go with the cloud hosting solution with a virtual server.
For software there is either ASP.NET or PHP. You would need that regardless if you decide to go to full jquery unless you host entirely in html and again i am not sure it can be done (szlamany may help on that).
Again it depends on what you are planning on doing.If you need, let's say a forum then i think Apache over IIS is better (am hosting a php forum in IIS but that is another story and you need server desktop environment for that).
If you planning on creating your own application then if you are VB trained(i suppose because you write in this forum) you better go with asp.net. Personally if i could start over i would have gone with php and mysql because Microsoft s@@#s a$$ , especially with the latest windows bull, they pissed me off. :D ,and of course the php stuff are free more or less.
Whow, long one.Let us know how it's going.