First thought is if shes serious about being a developer a) setting up a development system is a good and necessary skill to have for a web developer. As othe

First thought is if shes serious about being a developer a) setting up a development system is a good and necessary skill to have for a web developer. As other posts mentioned XAMPP, WAMP, etc are good methods to do it painlessly. Having a development machine makes development way easier as you can turn on error reporting, use interactive debugging tools, etc. things that are not as possible on a 3rd party host. b) getting some inexpensive hosting is a good thing for her career development. There are some quite reasonably priced hosting out there, I hear Dreamhost name a lot in that respect, I myself use Bluehost, quite good and inexpensive. Experience dictates to stay away from GoDaddy they are kind of the bad side of town internet wise with hard-sell pushing of services and misleading/confusing management pages. Being a developer isn't just having everything set up and ready to "make stuff" you have to learn a little bit of how it works underneath too.