I'm 37. And if I can give some life advice, it would be to always start from the end. If you're building sites, start with the host. Make sure you understand how to deploy your thing. Then work backwards, and setup your build-test-debug loop with deployment as the final goal. Once you get something working, you can incrementally improve your process - but you need to start with some way to get your stuff online.

Note that you must be very careful to define the scope of your project. "Putting something on the public internet" can be achieved with a blogger blog - no programming necessary. Or a hacker news comment, for that matter. But if you want to do arbitrary things with web browsers on the web then I highly recommend getting a VPS - I like linode, but there's plenty of other options. Another interesting option would be something like Google App Engine, which takes a lot of the pain out of system administration, while still allowing you to serve arbitrary applications (and it's cheaper than linode, too).