This is always a horrible plan - and yet almost all newbies end up doing it. Cutting costs is smart, but cutting them in the wrong places can simply be deadly for your fledgling business. 

 This is especially true when purchasing a domain name and hosting. Many people avoid getting a domain name and instead register through some free service that allows them to create a sub-domain on an existing domain. 

 This is horrible for a number of reasons. The most important reason is that you have pegged the future of your business to the future of another business. If that business fails or if they discontinue that particular service, then you have to find a new domain name, which means that all of your promotional efforts were a complete waste of time.  

 Getting free hosting can have similarly disastrous results. While it is “cheap,” it is almost always horrible, too. You will probably have to host advertisements for which you will receive no revenue. Additionally, don’t even think about adding a graphic header, a picture, or a flash presentation, as your site will load super slowly.  

 So what options are you left with? Clearly you won’t want to start by purchasing a dedicated server; that’s unnecessarily expensive. However, at a minimum, you will want to purchase a domain name - which you can get for $4-10 per year - and you will also want to purchase a low cost hosting service.  

Many companies now offer reasonably good hosting for as little as $7 per month. Just make sure that the company offers a comparably large amount of storage space and a comparably good set of site features, including forum scripts, blog ad-ons, cgi-bins, and the ability to perform chron-jobs.