WEBHOSTS

I use and recommend Lunarpages. One of my Columbia J-School professors, Duy Linh Tu, recommended it to me and it kind of rocks, especially compared to Web.com, which Dean Sree Sreenivasan recommended: $6.95 for 350gb storage and 3500gb bandwidth/month instead of $11.95 for 5gb and 20gb bandwidth. Neither have set up costs and both offer free domain names - Web.com for one year and LunarPages for life.

There's also Go Daddy - which like Web.com is also only 5gb (do you really need the 350gb LunarPages offers?). It has the advantage however of being only $3.99 a month and you can sign up for only 2 months to try it out first if you want... domain name costs $8.95/year in addition but that's still cheaper overall than LunarPages. I've heard bad things from people who have used it though, so watch out.

Otherwise, you can also go by Hosting Review, who ranks what they think are the best web hosts.

EMAIL

I used Gmail. In short, Hotmail sucks. It doesn't let you forward your mail to another address nor set up a vacation responder. Why? Because MSN wants to make sure you can't switch to another email provider in order to force you to use their service. Check this out for a detailed description of why Hotmail is terrible, and Gmail, in comparison, rocks.

I can't comment about Yahoo Mail: I used to use it many years ago but dropped it when they stopped offering POP mail for free (i.e. I could no longer use a mail client, in my case at the time Outlook, to check my email and had to go to yahoo.com instead. In the days of dial-up, it was enough to convince me to switch to another email provider). Although they still don't offer POP mail, the new version is very powerful, at least according to Walt Mossberg, the principal technology columnist for the Wall Street Journal.