Drupal is a powerful, free content management system (CMS), written in PHP. It has a active developer community and is constantly being improved and upgraded. You can read more about it here.

It depends on what you're planning to do with your site, but in general I have had good luck with Lunarpages. Lunarpages shared hosting is cheap and has been always been reliable for me. Their "dedicated virtual" service is too expensive, in my opinion.  Lunarpages has lowered their prices for virtual dedicated service, but I don't have any experience using it, so I can't recommend it.

Media Temple offers reliable (but more expensive) shared hosting with a bunch of cool upgrade options. Their dedicated virtual hosting is reasonably priced and has every feature you could want without renting your own server.

Don't use godaddy.com.

You need to get the domain name. Even if you ultimately never put up the site, you should get the domain name, just in case. Do it now. I mean it. Stop reading this and get the domain name.

I have mine registered with name.com, mainly because it's cheaper and less annoying than Network Solutions.

I'm not a web designer.  If I was, this site would have lots more colors and flying monkeys and whatnot.  I can put you in touch with some excellent designers, though.

In an effort to put a more professional shine on this site, I have moved all that content and delightful whimsicality to my and my wife's site, Lots of Neat Stuff.