Is it possible to give a website the following features without spending huge amounts of money?

Do it yourself. You’re not looking for anything highly exotic, but you won’t even find someone in India working for a few bucks an hour that will deliver all that for under $100.

What would the cost of doing it yourself be, though? You’re not really answering the question. And $100 isn’t the ceiling, I just thought I’d add that saving that much would also be good.
And there are websites out there you can subscribe to for less than outrageous fees that supposedly make this kind of thing easy, such as Ning.com or Web.com, but I just don’t know much about their actual features and therefore whether it’d be a good investment or not. I’m looking for someone with experience using sites like that, since they’re the ones that would know how to answer.

@guywithanaccountnow Your question is about as specific as “How much to build a house?” You’d need to provide reams of details to get specific enough to let someone give you a detailed quote.

Can you provide some more detail on this? It sounds like you’re either going to take the blog route or the forum route. Either way, it can surely be done under a thousand bucks. You’ll probably go over a hundred though, unless you’re doing it all yourself and grabbing the apps and plugins off the internet as freebies.

Stuff like ning.com and web.com will give you hardly any flexibility and don’t represent a very good value in the long run.

@ETpro , there’s plenty of guys on oDesk that work for pretty amazing rates.

There are very few details here – including what you are intending to do with this site. Is it to be a fun site for you and your friends? Are you attempting to launch a new business?
Anyway, $1000 is just “let’s talk” money when it comes to development. If you hire me at $50/hr, there is very little product I could actually develop in 20 hours. And we’re not even discussing designer costs if this is to be semi-pro site.

As @ETpro suggested, maybe you could use this as an opportunity to learn how to create this yourself. Coming up with a good idea you’re passionate about is the best motivation when it comes to learning how to develop.

If you are going the forum route you can consider using phpbb , which is free and open source. If you are going to blog route you can download from wordpress. I’ve built my own website for the university course page I’m teaching—it took a bit of figuring out to get it looking exactly how I wanted, but I didn’t have to pay anyone to do it.

You wouldn’t need to build it from scratch, they come with different styles that you could then customise or tweak (given a bit of figuring out).

Here is another website built using a free and open source website tool called concrete5, and has a forum built from phpbb.

Also, you have to figure out whether you want your own domain name; and that can cost $. I use dreamhost and while there are probably better ones out there, it has everything I need and comes with all these freebie apps.