Define cheap

Also, my spawn point is right by a huge river.... and my house is on the water.... I guess you mean being in the water lags?
Yes. ANYTHING getting in the water seems to cause massive lag. Including passive mobs. Including squid. >_< If the water is, like, only a couple of blocks deep, you'll be fine, there just seems to be a problem with deeper water eating up processor cycles, at least for me.
There's a creative server that I also go on, but it's whitelisted. If anyone wants to join, I can tell the server host your username.
Also, to access the IRC for the economy server, go to
http://webchat.quakenet.org/ and put Strallo as the chat room name. You can use that site to see if the server is on and you can chat with people on the server.
-Cookieo
And this will work without any kind of software install?