I have recently begun putting into motion an idea that I had a few years ago. I have created a website http://www.kansascityfantasy.com in hopes to gather as many Kansas City area Fantasy Sports Junkies into one spot as possible. My hopes: gather KC area fantasy players into one spot, have all fantasy commissioners in the KC area host a board for their league, commishes to be able to advertise for owners to participate in local live in-person drafts, and general banter. The problem: other than basic HTML knowledge, I am fairly limited in my knowledge and need help. If there is anyone who can help me with anything, It would be greatly appreciated.

Things that I need help with:
- Currently the website is hosted on a free webserver... what is the best free server with the most features? Or, what is the best method?
- Currently the forum is hosted at http://www.proboards.com it is a nice site, but I would like to host the forum myself... the problem.... I don't know how. Can you help?
- Any pro webmasters that are interested in helping me redesign and add any beneficial features to the website to improve anything they can think of would be a great help.
- The website isn't a money maker, what is the best way to advertise for free, or have the forum/website generate money for advertising? and how can I advertise?
- Any other suggestions would be greatly appreciated

I have no idea how to set up my own forum. that is what im working on now. can anyone suggest a free web host that has a self install forum in the cpanel tools, or will someone walk me through it.

What number of visitors do you plan to have on your forum? You should at least approximately define the amount of disk space and bandwidth you might need for your forum.
If you don't want to spend money on buying vbulletin license, go for mybb, phpbb, smf. I would look for a hosting plan with the hosting script installed, like onthespothosting.net shared plan with phpbb.
As for other points like optimization and promotion, visit the forum www.vbulletin.nl/index.php, it's about vbulletin, but you can get there lots of useful tips.

I cannot really recommend you phpBB. I've used it a lot in the past but it has too many bugs and security issues and I can't trust it anymore.

An alternative of the phpBB for me was SMF - I can't say a bad word for that forum. You might want to go with it.

in fact, i using vbulletin now. and i got hacked yesterday.
spend few hours fixed it.

I wonder has anyone seen stats on different types of forum scripts hacked?