If your hobby is not directly computer related, then once again the space provided by your ISP will suffice. Even if you want counters and guestbooks, you don't have to have them on your site. There are companies that can provide them for you, with the obligatory advertising of course.

If you want to create your own page counters and guest book you will need a server that can handle the CGI scripting required to do this.

If your hobby happens to be creating web pages or multimedia, then you may require the extras that are only available on a paid hosting server.

There is really no option here. You need a paid hosting service, although be aware that each hosting company offers a range of hosting packages at varying price levels.

The price that you pay will determine the amount of hard disk space that you have available on the server, the amount of downloads that are permitted before extra charges apply, whether or not your get access to secure servers for e-commerce and maybe a few others things.

Basically the more you pay, the more you get, just make sure that you don't pay for something that you don't really need. If you are not sure, then start with one of the basic options. The webhosting companies will quite readily let you upgrade to another package if you find that you need it.

Don't forget, if you are using Microsoft FrontPage and you want to use the FrontPage extensions, then you will need a webhost that supports them.

If your host doesn't do this, you will either have to change to a host that does, or turn off the extensions from the Tools/Options settings.