Regarding one of my sites, the 
domain name costs me: $60 total to own the name for 5 years, plus the hosting service at $125 total for two yrs. Some hosting companies are cheaper. Others cost more. It depends on the services they offer.
One company has a service that allows me to see how many times each site is visited, where in the world the visitor lives (I've had people visit my sites from New York, Washington, Arizona, California, South America, the UK, France, Africa, India, the Ukraine, China, Canada and Australia, et al), the best day of the week (seems to be Wednesdays), the best hour of the day (seems to be 9 p.m.), the IP address of the person visiting, and the browser used by the visitor. Having stats like this is good for marketing purposes. Marketing is important, otherwise your site just sits out there in cyberspace.
There are many sites that allow you to advertise on them for free. Each site has its own requirements for doing so, like visiting them so many times each day, or allowing a link to their site to be placed on yours, though that's not always the case. You could start a new kind of site for your area... sort of a show room for others in your area and around the country. Let them advertise on your site for a fee, or at the very least you and all the others exchange links. Why should you pay others to advertise on their site when you can sell ad space on your site? You can do the same thing. Give a better rate.
If you're not that adept at making your own site, you could buy a website creator that takes you through the process step-by-step. Some go for just under $200. Others go for $400 or more. I use a company that charges a one-time fee of $197. I still use it but have progressed to the point where I can do it all myself if I want to... just no need to right now. The company allows me to make unlimited sites. Other companies are a bit more expensive. You might want to check with your present hosting company. They might offer you the use of a web site creator built right into their service. One important feature is that you need access to the control panel. The control panel is where you can add, delete, or make any changes you want to your site.
I'm endlessly busy teaching myself coding: HTML, CSS, JavaScript. This isn't mandatory, but you should know some coding if you want to create your own site.
Another advantage of using someone else's website creator program is that they have the FTP built in. FTP stands for "File Transfer Protocol". Whenever you download anything on the net, or even send an email, there has to be program somewhere that transfers the file in question. The program that does this is called a protocol. In short, it's called a FTP, or "File Transfer Protocol". All good hosting companies should have their own file transfer protocol. I have one with my hosting company, but I also bought my own. Having my own gives me more control. Some companies will charge you approx $300 to make the site for you. Others will charge you $1,000 or more! Or, you can learn how to do it yourself for "free". I put "free" in quotation marks as just how much you put into your site, whether it's time or money is entirely up to you.
The reason I said you may not be able to use the same name you have now is that once a name is taken, it's taken, and your present hosting company may have legal rights to the name. If you can't use your present name like xyz.com, then try x-y-z.com (yes, the hyphen makes it a completely different name). Try using:
- .com
- .net
- .info, or
- .org
- x-y-z.com
- x-y-z.net
- x-y-z.info, and
- x-y-z.org.
The advantages of using hyphens is that it makes reading the domain name much easier (compare: johnny-be-good.com to johnnybegood.com).
