Several years ago, this would cost a great deal of money every month. It was no unusual for companies to be paying thousands of dollars a month for the ability to have a website. This is because of the storage allotments and data transfer. Each visitor, in essence, cost that company money.
"Paypal!??!" I hear some of you murmuring. Yes. It has it's critics and I'm one of them but until I hit the jackpot (or get a full time job) it remains one of my only options.
Another aspect of web hosting you should be paying attention to is their uptime. A reliable web host is, in fact, more important than the cost of the host. If your site isn't being loaded, then you are not earning any money. A hosting company with over 99% uptime isn't a fantasy. Most companies, especially like IMHosted, have almost 100% uptime. No company will ever achieve this level of reliability, but anything below 99% should not be acceptable anymore.
There are literally thousands of companies that will host your website on their servers for you and the prices are based upon the package you choose. If you will be streaming videos from your site and using a large amount of bandwidth, then you can expect to pay more. I prefer to use an unlimited bandwidth web host package such as DreamHost for $8.95 per month. Other premium web hosts will charge $30 or more on a monthly basis.
There are alternatives. You could buy a domain and have it redirect to your sub-domain. It's an easy to remember address you can list in directories and tell read more your friends, it also is much more memorable. Again, disadvantages: as people will link to your redirecting .com address, you lose out any search engine ranking you could have gained by them linking to your actual address (the sub-domain).
These networks can also help in finding relevant blogs or web-sites to get links from. Some search engines see links coming from relevant web-sites or blogs as a huge boost to the blogs authority stature. Another good point is you have total control who does and does not link to you.