Bluehost.com
Recently I purchased domain and hosting with http://www.bluehost.com and overall I am very happy with their customer service as well as hosting quality in relation to being a first timer. Bluehost.com’s site setup manager is well laid out (putting everything into categories) and the help files for each section were very helpful. From setup to final payment the process seemed much shorter than some of the competing websites and honestly, Godaddy.com seemed nearly schizoid to me despite the claims of #1 this and that. That’s cool and all to have a sponsored spokesmodel, and I’m sure it helps that there are a ton of up-sell features, however for my purposes (hosting a blog, some photos, forums, maybe a few videos) I just wanted something simple, to the point without all the “click here for another $50 you can add a gnome who will come to your house and unclog your internets.” So I am overall very satisfied with the ease, price ($83 for a year, with domain name registration) and setup of bluehost.com, and I will recommend them to my friends in the future.
Note: I purchased the Deluxe package, with the hosting privacy option, then uploaded wordpress (www.wordpress.org)
WordPress.org
Originally I had thought of going the free route with http://www.wordpress.com however some of what I learned from the 30DC (www.thirtydaychallenge.com) taught me that having my own hosting / domain would be slightly more advantageous. For me I wanted to have more control over the backend and I thought it would be cool to have my own hosting so I can upload / download, set up additional services or things. Granted I could get forum hosting free somewhere (www.freeforums.org), then also use free image hosting somewhere else like www.photobucket.com then I would have a largely ad-supported free setup (which in hindsight is a viable option for people if free is the name of the game). I will say that the setup for wordpress to be uploaded is intermediate rather than say as easy as setting up a facebook account or twitter account: some assembly required. However renaming files, editing a text file, and then creating a MySQL database on the hosting side where only a matter of following well-detailed instructions off the wordpress.org site. To their credit their documentation / support is very thorough and clear.
Google Ad-sense / Amazon affiliate
In addition to the new hosting / wordpress setup I also signed up for google ad-sense / amazon affiliate as you may or may not notice on the site. More on my methodology and mindset for my site in the About Me section.
Hyper24x7