...spent playing with my RepRap might get useful at some point! ;)

You say you're a skeptic, but you're going about this the wrong way by trying to confirm the existence of ghosts. It seems to presuppose the conclusion. You're going in to test, but already you're confirmation biased: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias

You want to go in there and find out what's REALLY going on. Not look for ghosts. Or leave it to someone who knows what they're doing. If you start measuring electrical activity and whatnot, who knows what you'll pick up. But a ghost is still extremely unlikely. Ever heard of Occam's Razor?

Anyway, before you start measuring (experimenting), you need a likely hypothesis that you're going to be testing. Good luck on that one with the ghosts.

Haha, way to go Slashdot! So I have to input http://xn--4gbrim.xn----rmckbbajlc6dj7bxne2c.xn--wgbh1c/ instead of http://-./ ?

(Not that anyone will see what I originally meant)

...and both twitter and bit.ly fail to handle the IDNs correctly. Twitter doesn't make http://-./ a link, and bit.ly just says "Server Error".

But then again, nobody could have thought this would be easy... I have an email address ending in .name, and 4 character TLDs can even be difficult sometimes.

This depends a lot on what you want to do. For my experimental/root needs, I use slicehost, because they are solid and I have full root access. For my one-click-install maintained services and servers, I use dreamhost. Dreamhost is a bit slow from Europe (because of the distance and RTT), but it works fine for me. If you want a service that gives you both, you're looking at higher prices from someone like rackspace.

All the above have decent support that answer within reasonable time and have a clue, which I find is very important. I'm done wasting time with support where different people give different answers, didn't understand the question or didn't actually even bother to read the question.