I have seen a good offer from Fasthosts which has free unlimited Email Forwarding - which I guess is what happens with Google Apps?
No, email forwarding and email hosting are (strictly speaking) two different things.
Once you buy a domain name you will invariably be given access to a control panel to manage your domain records. One of these is the MX record where you define what the mail domain name will be for your domain; e.g. <mydomain.co.uk MX mail.mydomain.co.uk>. In the control panel you then map your MX record to any mail server you wish - the mail server where your email messages will be received and stored. If you use gmail as your mail hoster then you will point your myemail@mydomain.co.uk -> mail.google.com (or whatever it's IP address is). If you use fasthosts then you will point your MX record in your domain control panel to e.g. mail.fasthosts.co.uk. Of course, before you do that you will need to subscribe with the hosting company that owns the particular mail server.
After you start receiving messages on the said mail server you can set up mail server side options. One of the options is to forward emails to another email address. So, you could set up mail forwarding in your google account to forward any email messages sent to myemail@mydomain.co.uk to myotheremail@hotmail.com.
(I have simplified the above and hope I have explained it correctly - others will put me right here if need be I'm sure.)
Thanks for all help, will be looking into it shortly, but that Google thing is great and free idea, email hosting is expensive
Well, do a simple calculation:
Get the rating of the PSU of your computer. Then multiply its kwh rating x 365 days x 24 hours x cost of electricity for each kwh. If you have a large desktop you will see that it is probably more expensive than buying the hosting service from a data centre for a year. If you also include the cost of buying a PC and a UPS then it will soon become apparent that the only way you could make this pay is if you hosted the email accounts and websites of all your friends, neighbours and passers by! Hold on, did you add the cost of maintaining the server, updating its software, running regular backups with a separate physical storage, etc.?
It all soon adds up. If you are prepared to take risks then you could use your old laptop I guess and employ some solar panel solution to pay less for electricity, but you get my point.
There is no free lunch. Google offer their standard webapps for free because they make money out of advertising (when you use their webmail interface). Fasthosts et al. have to charge what it costs them (plus a small profit) to earn a living.
Back to your hosting question: the first step is to buy your own domain name. Then you can point your mail record wherever you like and change it to another server address when you want to. So, start with gmail (if only because it is free) and if you don't like it you can try another email hoster.
HTH.