The costs of hosting depend on what you are trying to to. For instance, my portfolio site got less than 100 unique visitors a month so it required cheap hosting (I used Liquidweb's $15/mo plan). But on the other end, TalkFreelance is hosted on a dedicated server with Theplanet, I do not know the costs of that, but would assume it is one of their lesser unmanaged dedicated. Bigger sites require bigger servers and smaller sites don't need anything past shared hosting. So there is no definitive "best" host for you to go with.

If you don't know anything about webhosting or web servers, I don't think you will be able to pull this together in a few days. Take some time and do your homework on google, both on the hosting industry and the company you wish to go with.

ps. moved to Web Hosting and Domain Chat.