Right now I am somewhat caught between getting hosting or continuing to do so out of my house.
Be aware that many ISPs forbid running web servers on a residential connection. You may get your service cut off if you're not careful about that.
Is the email service reliable?
Reasonably so. Actual outages appear to be fairly rare. A bigger problem is that there are a lot of ignorant people running web sites on a shared server, and it only takes one with a hacked site or forwarding emails (including third party spam) to another provider to get the whole server blacklisted as a spammer. If you don't do much outbound emailing, this may not be a major problem for you. Your inbound emails are not affected. If you're heavily dependent on outbound emails, you may find the constant spam blocks a problem. In that case, you'd probably have to move to VPS or even dedicated server (sharing your email IP address with few, or no, others), or to a third-party email service. LP does respond pretty quickly to spam blacklistings of its servers, but it's a never-ending battle, as servers are constantly blacklisted. Note that this is probably going to be a problem with any hosting service, unless they're extremely restrictive about what they let you put on your site.
Second - What do I do about a domain? I don't have one but the one I want is not taken. Is this taken care of when I sign up? What's the domain registration fee?
I do plan on having TWO domain names at one point, both sites running wordpress (lets face it, I'm too lazy to do the html anymore) and possibly a message board - is this possible?
You are not required to obtain your domain name(s) through LP. You are free to register them with any other registrar (possibly for a better price) and point them to the LP server. This would allow you to register your domains
now and avoid losing them, while you are looking around for a server. Unlike some hosting companies, LP does not retain ownership of domain names you buy through them, but I would suggest that it's still cleaner to have domain names completely separate from the hosting service. This enables you to more easily move your hosting to another provider if for some reason you are dissatisfied with your current provider. By the way, LP is a reseller for Tucows (the actual domain registrar).
As @Mitch said, you can easily run two or more domains on a Basic (or Business) plan, one being an "add-on", which will be seen by visitors as a completely independent site, with no association with the "primary" domain's site.
Last, I'm not sure which hosting plan to use. I will have probably 10-12 pages at first, a few pictures, PDF, and word documents - for documentation starting out. Any suggestions?
I think that the very low cost "starter" plans will not permit add-on domains, so Basic (which does) is probably a good place to start. You can always upgrade to Business plan, or a VPS or dedicated server as your needs grow.
What is the billing cycle? Am I prepaying for 12, 24, 48 months or is that how long I commit to?
Yes, you prepay (the entire amount up front). There is a 30 day money-back guarantee, but after that, while you are free to walk away from LP at any time, you will forfeit your payment.
