I'd like to work on my own projects on different computers...on the road on a laptop, or at home on the desktop, or even at work. I'd like to keep the data relatively private, and I don't want to pay for private repositories on github.
Ideally, I'd host a git or svn repository on my web host, or something like that. Can I do that? Or is there a web services-based version control system out there that accomplishes the same thing?
My hosting provider, Dreamhost, provides Subversion repositories (along with Trac). However, if you can install a repository depends mostly on your hosting provider and what features they allow. Some make it easy, others won't allow you to install what you need to even set one up.
I use beanstalk as well for about 2 months now, I'm very happy with it, it also has integration to lighthouse so I can close bugs/issues with commit to SVN.
I also have a local VPS server hosted and I installed the VisualSvn Server on it, it works great but it's a bit on the expensive side.