I've gotten good results / speed from
www.ace-host.net (note the ".net" ace-host.com is a forward to fasthost who have poor support from my understanding) The signup is very user freindly. More importantly for you, they offer a variety of "plug-ins" that you can install on your site directly from their control panel (the place you'll administer the site from... not to be confused with the place you'll create the pages from).
Anyway, one of the plugins is PHP-Nuke which is a free site designer that has forums integrated in it. If you've ever seen
www.jeepz.com, it's a very similar look and feel. I would not be surprised if Terry is running Nuke. There's a little bit of a learning curve for installation, but a very strong user community for help. Administration/page creation is much easier than trying to put a forum into html.
http://www.phpnuke.org/
I like mambo for site design, too. It's also php based, but a little trickier to install and get the hang of. I've never used the forums module with it, but it's not as native as Nuke's forums.
www.basementdesignguys.com done with mambo.
PHP is a much more flexible language than html. The ease of creating a site (as opposed to a couple pages linked together) and the much cleaner look of a completed site make the learning curve well worth it in my opinion. It depends how far you want to take it. If you want forums, a PHP variation is the way to go. Feel free to take it to PM if you have specific questions.
-X
