I recently moved my Web site (noobbox.com) over to the Drupal Content Management System. This won't mean much to anyone who just browses the web, but to site owners, a CMS can be a life saver.
Recently I was working on a Web site for somebody and they needed a way to allow multiple users to upload pictures. Being the idiot I am, I started writing one from scratch. There is an incredible number of things to take into consideration from password recovery to permissions and the possibility of needing to extend/add features. I started looking at Drupal because in Web Team, we're migrating the district's Web sites over to Drupal.
What a nice system. It has everything you need, and it's modular which means anybody can develop add-ons for it. One thing that takes a little work is moving existing templates/layouts over to being a Drupal theme. If you take a look at my site, you'll see that some things are still a little whacky (I'm having issues with the breadcrumbs div) but overall it's much easier to maintain my site as well as log information about my visitors.
The only thing that Drupal could use (and I mean this as a module, so you developers out there may want to look at this) is a Download manager. I need a section of my site to have categories, files with descriptions and download counter, password-protection per-file option, with upload and mirror capabilities. I couldn't find one so right now I'm using Olate Download.
So if you're looking for a way to manage your Web site without having to type in HTML or PHP constantly, I'd suggest using a CMS like Drupal, Joomla!, Xoops or PHPNuke. Read more about Moving to Drupal
Just a quick update, I've redone the 
For a long time now I've been running my websites from a server I setup in my basement ( running Ubuntu of course ;] ). The positive to it was hell, I had my own dedicated server with full physical access to it and full administrative control over. The negative to it was that it ate a lot of bandwidth, and some things were loading a bit slow. So I moved to paid hosting. 