Hey R30buff,
I host my site with xo.com (www.xo.com ). I registered my domain with network solutions. When I started this site, there were no other places for me to register. Try asking where many of the people here got their sites registered; I really don’t know of any right of the top of my head. Try cnet.com and search for Web hosts. They might provide you with some more info.
To buy, try www.gandi.net , i seem to remember it’s like $10 a year, but it’s in France
Hosting: depends if you’d accept adds or not, if yes, www.citeglobe.com (in french too) is taking subscriptions from 31st oct. on, you get 100mb …
The French provider Free (www.free.fr) also gives you 100mb + up to 5 aliases (so you can have 600 mb!), no ads…