I recently purchased a linode account for the same reason and am really enjoying it. For $20 I have a linux server to toy with and have been learning a lot from

I recently purchased a linode account for the same reason and am really enjoying it. For $20 I have a linux server to toy with and have been learning a lot from it. The one really nice thing about their setup is the management console that makes deploying whichever distro you want really easy and then monitoring really easy. Also as Jaddison said, they have some a really solid community and the support is excellent.