Although free web hosting and blogs are a great way to start out, registering your own domain and renting hosting space is the only way you will have full control over your content. Most of the free services disallow commercial pages, so making money of your blog or web site will be difficult. Domain name registration and hosting means that you can put whatever you want on your pages (of course, some limitations apply depending on your hosting company).

Domain name registration
Registering a domain name is easy, and very affordable. The only thing that is difficult is to find a domain that you think is good AND that is available. Most of the companies registering domain names are good. The quality is a lot more consistent than with web hosting, as the technical requirements for being a domain registrar are quite high.

Web hosting
Choosing a web hosting company can be a hassle, trust me, as there are so many low quality hosts out there. The barrier to start a hosting company is so low that it means that literally anyone can start one in a matter of weeks. Read through some of the reviews written by previous or current customer, and focus on the average of scores, especially if there are many reviews. The more reviews, the more certain you can be that the average tells you something meaningful. The best web hosting companies will have many customers that want to spread the word!