What kind of registration/hosting services do you use for these sites?

I'd like to be free to play around with small projects on the web, but the prices that I've found make me hesitate to start something that seems frivolous.

For example, at godaddy.com: -1 year of registration for a .com domain costs ~$10/yr -1 year of "economy" hosting costs ~$4.75/mo This means that I'd have to spend about $67 before I can start hacking away on my weekend project.

Is this normal? I'm fairly new to working in the web space, and as far as I know it may very well be the case that people are willing to drop 60-70 bucks per year on a hobby website the same way they would, for example, spend $40-$100 on an Arduino + kit as a cheap way to play around with mechatronics/robotics.

Is that about right? Or is there an even lower-barrier-to-entry option that I've missed?

I use Google Apps for my domains: http://www.google.com/a/cpanel/domain/new It's actually cheaper than GoDaddy. With GoDaddy, it's $10/year plus $10 to keep the WHOIS anonymous. Otherwise, you'll have your name and contact info publicly available to anyone who requests a WHOIS on your domain (which means you get spammed). With Google, you get both the domain and the anonymity for $10/year.

For hosting, I've been using Linode, which is a virtual private server. I had to install everything on the Linux server myself (Apache, Rails, web security, etc.). It sets me back $20/month, but I can put hundreds of websites there. Right now I have probably about a dozen there.

For 2rgb.com, I'm trying out heroku.com. The hosting starts out completely free (and no ads). You pay only when you get more traffic. And you don't have to set up the server at all (like I did for Linode). You just send it your code. It might be a Ruby-only host, though.

Thanks! I'm going to try out heroku as well.