I think your explanation is too generic to get good advice. You should expand on what you want to do if possible.

I think the best way I can explain it is that this feels the same as contacting a caterer and saying "I have an event with people, what should I serve?" Any good answer would require knowing the type of event, the venue, dietary requirements, number of people, budget etc. Same with you task, but we need to know more about skills, specific functionality, goals, etc.

The actual answer, in my opinion, is that hosting, software stack and secure storage of data aren't a big concern at this point. You have an idea. Turn that into a plan including all the features you think you need to launch a first version of your app. Remove 50% of the features. Remove another 50%. Talk to potential customers. When you have a solid plan, then you can start worrying about how to make it happen. Then build it using whatever software stack you know best.

I think you should elaborate further on what your skill set/s are, so you can get specific feedback on stack, hosting and implementation.

To get started on hosting, it's hard to beat something like Digital Ocean; $5 or $10 / month and you can run all your test infrastructure (and if you feel like staying with them, push a button and scale as your app demands it). There are a few other good cheap options to get started, such as OVH, if you want a dedicated box; ramnode is interesting.

I can perform system admin work and what I consider basic scripting. Today's task for instance is downloading debian 7, installing, adding beautiful soup and playing with it to obtain data for statistical analysis related to sports.

My biggest issue is that I have not played on machines that are remote site and having to learn the current best practices. It has been about 13 years since I configured Apache.

Digital Ocean sounds like it is worth looking into.

It sounds like your biggest wall is going to be the actual app programming. Do you have any experience with Java or Objective-C? If learning those languages isn't likely in the cards, you still have a couple of other options, namely a HTML5 + javascript compiled app (this might get shit on here at HN, but depending on your app demands, it can definitely work fine; the html + javascript gets compiled to native code). These are worth looking at:

http://www.phonegap.com

http://html5dev-software.intel.com/ (this used to be called AppMobi / jqmobi, a reduced concept semi-clone of jquery mobile; Intel purchased it)

http://www.sencha.com

I've used all three. Sencha has a bit of a steep learning curve, but is nice. The Intel Framework is very easy to get started with; it's pretty fast for what it does; and so long as you're not trying to build the next Instagram, it'll work for a lot of different types of average apps. Using the Intel Framework, the scripting is similar to jquery, it fully supports javascript, and you can easily make ajax calls from the compiled app to a php / python / ruby back-end hosted somewhere else.

For a normal app, the systems side is pretty trivial. A modestly well configured $150 dedicated box will support 99% of all apps these days; and the bottom 50% of apps, based on usage, can be supported on a $20 Digital Ocean style account. If you're going to have a large active user base, then a very well run back-end is obviously that much more important. Today's powerful hardware provides a huge amount of slack on the back-end for a typical app, it's simply unlikely you're going to need to run at hyper efficiency.

I'll bookmark this thread, if you have questions I'd be happy to answer as many as I can here. It can seem like (is) a daunting challenge to build and launch an app.

Thanks. I'll look the sites over and see which one will work best. I'm sure I'll have more questions, but I'm glad to know that 'slack' is available.

I think you might have misread. There is no mention of a mobile app.

While I'm not intending to develop for a mobile app per se, I think I have to keep it in mind as I'm learning.

One question I have in that regard is how to make an app that is most useable for the widest audience?

It really depends on what the app does, if it is something that the UX will differ greatly between a mobile device and a desktop, then I would say build a completely separate mobile version of the site. However, if it is only subtle changes then just create a responsive app that looks good on all devices.

You're right, I saw the app part and immediately thought that (didn't catch the "web" part of it).

If it's a webapp and you do not have much knowledge of java/.net frameworks then go for LAMP(PHP/MYSQL). And i assume that you already know basic HTML and Java script