Where to start, Lets start with what are you going to use for hosting, got to have a place for your art, yes building a site, page, is an art. You are an artist in your field.
Free hosting. Unless it is for a blog, or sponsor provided free hosting. Forget it. Your going to get ripped in some way or another. With domains being so cheap and hosting even cheaper if your going to do tgp galleries or free sites, don't even go the free hosting route.
With blogs you can go with like
thumblogger or
xlogz
Cheap hosting: I have seen hosting go as cheap as $6.99 a month for a gadzillion gigs of bandwidth, and a assload of server space. I won't mention any hosting names here. But this is what happens. You pay for a year up front it sounds like an awesome deal. You think you could never burn all the bandwidth they offer in a month. You can't because this is how they burn you. You have a few sites that start burning bandwidth, your useing server resources. You will one day find your sites either gone or you will get an email. What you have been busted for is useing to many server resources. In there terms of service (tos) is something about server resource usage. You contact them and they will upsell you to another plan. This works for maybe a few months, then it all comes back again. Your screwed. They will either completly remove your sites, and you my friend are flat ass dead in the water. You may get lucky and they might let you backup your sites, or they are just gone.. Poof.
What are you to do? The best hosting is
cyberwurx They host netpond and have for a long time. They do have beginner plans. The trick with them is watch your bandwidth if you see your going to go over your plan, call them or email them and up your plan before you go over and you won't pay an overage fee.
Once you start getting to a point where your seem to spending a over $200 a month on hosting, its time to think about your own box.