Off Topic: You can try invisionboard (http://www.invisionboard.com) that is more like VBulletin phpbb2 is kinda plain.

On Topic: Does that appache/MySQL/PHP thing mentioned earlier cost anything? Also, could the site be just your ip, until you get a domain? like say your ip was 64.xx.xx.xxx or whatever, you could just type that in and it would display your site, correct?