Hi MaJik Mike, welcome aboard.
I'm gonna tell you what has been told several times before on this board
First try to get familiar with building and submitting freesites yourself. Don't start with you LL right away. You can group all your freesites on some kind of "hub". Once you have build and submitted enough freesites yourself you will see there where lots of things you didn't know back then. If you still want to start a LL after all this you can turn your hub, which should have a nice PR and some traffic by now into a LL.
Remember, there's no quick money to be made with LL's most of the time it takes a few years before you start getting a decent return from it.
As for scripts, the most popular ones out there are:
Link Admin
Xpowerlinks
DragonList
... damn I'm thinking of another one but can't remember the name
For your hosting I'd use a reliable host. You can go with a cheap one that offers you lots of BW and unlimited storage but 9 out of 10 the support isn't what it should be. Specially when you work with scripts support is very important as I found out myself. I myself, along with a lot of other members of this board, am very happy with
Colo-cation. CD34 who ownes this hosting compabny is a member of this board so you should get in touch with him
Sponsors... that's totally up to you. Just start out with sme board sponsors I'd say. Check out
Greenguy's stats to see what works and what doesn't.
There ya go, my $0.02