I am looking for server hosting and have found that US hosting seems to be much cheaper and seems to offer more bang for its buck I was wondering why this is?

Also this will be my first domain hosting and therefore alot of what I upload is going to be practice, eventually I will want to be able to put up a portfolio and so on but I am just really confused about the price differences and what all the different services actually do.

All I know is I need SQL server 2005 and .NET support and ASP.NET.