Big web hosting company at servage dot com, give you 300 GB for $6.50 per month. They have scripts that will automatically install Joomla 1.5 (or older version 1.13) in about 1 minute. It automatically sets up a mySQL database. That is much easier and hacker safe than putting up your own server.

Joomla dot org has a complete user manual. Forum with many helpful people. You will need to download many extension from there anyway. Joomla does not come with a forum, but you can get one there.