It sounds like www.freehostia.com is for you, firstly for a simple site you can have free space with no adds and it has 250 MB storage, you can also have a free subdomain myself.freehostia.com but thats not ideal because it will not work with www.....
you can buy a domain name and have a free web space account
but as you say he has some money to spend and buying names can be expensive he could buy the one domain name buy the space as well giving extra features including outgoing mail capability (the free hosting will allow receiving only to prevent you spamming people) he will then be able to have as many as 20 subdomain names i think so if he is www.jo.com he could also have
http://whatever.jo.com but be warned that this will not work as www.whatever.jo.com so he may prefer to buy all the names the main domain name could host an index with the sub domains being the individual sites
for example I have the main domain www.simons-photography.com and then a subdomain for an (as of yet empty) forum at
http://forum.simons-photography.com
if that sort of thing suits him then that would be cheaper than buyng half a dozen web domains at freehostia there are 20 sub domains to a main domain name and each sub domain is a separate site space (but is part of the hosting account space in the case of the cheapest on 500 MB the total of all stuff on all subdomains must not exceed 500 MB but who needs that much)