Hello, I am brand new to elgg as well and I just got set up with arvixe.com as you mentioned. They do set it up for free, but it took me a while to figure out where to go to get it done. I am not familiar with their control panel and it was confusing but it set it up real fast and all is well.

Now I just need to figure out how to customize elgg. It seems as though elgg was writen for programmers only, because if you don't have the book on elgg and if your not a programmer, you are stuck with the plain out of the box version.

I can hold my own with xhtml and css, but this is rediculous. I know nothing about php and I can't find the files I need to edit for the life of me.

Sorry, don't mean to be negative. elgg has the best rating out of all the sites in their class, I am just frustrated that everything is so clouded.