I believe I could help you here. If you want a website and you are not sure if you want to buy a website domain just yet. I would recommend starting off with
Google Pages. You will get at least 100MB for space on Google Pages.
For the forums thing, I would recommend using
PunBB. It is pretty basic but it is a forum and it is small in size. There are a lot of mods for PunBB that can be found on the PunBB website and on
PunRes. I use PunBB myself and I haven't had any problems with it. I am recommending that you be careful with some of the modifications that you make with PunBB because it may mess up the whole forum.
If you have decide that you would like to buy a website domain, I would recommend using
Geeks to Go Web Hosting. Geeks to Go Web Hosting offers Domain Registration and Website Hosting.
I hope I helped.
The Matt