Free Domain Names And Hosting Plans

Only 5 or 6 short years ago, registering a domain was a complicated, costly process. Getting hosting for your website wasn’t much better. Back then, I had a set of ten domains (none of which I have today) that cost US$55/yr each for the registration. While I didn’t get hosting for all of the domains, the ones I did have cost about $29.99-$49.99/m, depending on monthly traffic.

In the inbetween years, domain name registration and site hosting costs dropped.  Today, they cost very little. I currently have two host providers, one of which is a very well-known company that lets you register a .com domain for only US$8.95/yr. But they run a regular promotion where if you also purchase hosting or some other non-domain product at the same time that you register, the second year of registration is only US$1.99. Now given that their most basic hosting plan is only US$3.95/m, the cost of setting up a website is significantly less than just a few years ago. Even when you add in a few bells and whistles, the cost is still pretty reasonable compared to a few years ago.

But that’s not all. You can in fact set up a website at no cost, provided you’re willing to accept a few restrictions:

1. You’re willing to share a TLD (Top-Level Domain) name with other people.
2. That you do not actually own the domain name.
3. That you don’t need to upload any media files to the domain.
4. That you typically can only have a weblog type of website.

For example, many of my older weblogs are hosted on Blogger.com’s Blogspot.com domain. That means that everyone who sets up a weblog at blogspot.com will have their own unique subdomain but the same TLD. An example is one of my old cooking weblogs, Curry Elvis Cooks, which is at curryelviscooks.blogspot.com. While the content on the weblog is mine, the subdomain is owned by Blogger.com (which was purchased by Google some time ago).

Another shared domain is wordpress.com, which incorporates the popular WordPress blogging software with free-hosted domains. Typepad is another, which uses the Typepad blogging platform (which is a variation of SixApart’s powerful Movable Type blogging platform). There are many others available, but typepad.com, wordpress.com, and blogspot.com are amongst the three most popular. One thing to note is that you can use some or all of these services to create a weblog on your own domain name.

If these restrictions do not suit you, or you feel that you business credibility requires that you own your own domain name, you can still get free hosting from some Internet host providers. The catch is that, in return for the free hosting, your host provider will display some advertising in a very conspicuous place: right at the very top of your webpages, which is a prime piece of real estate on a webpage.

So while you can set up a website at practically no monetary costs, the restrictions may be more than you are willing to pay. Such options may be suitable if you are, say, an artist or musician, business owners should register their own domain names. It gives you more credibility when you hand someone your business card and your website address is similar to or matches your business name.

(c) Copyright 2006, Raj Kumar Dash, http://www.itsmybizniz.com/

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