Build Your Own Website

We all love free. No costs out of pocket and we get what we want. It’s a beautiful thing. So now let’s provide something for free, shall we? Writing’s free, right? Just the time involved. So you can go through this whole set of articles and you’ll be able to have a site up and running and it won’t cost a cent, if you don’t want it to.

Same thing for web hosting. There are a number of free hosts out there. You won’t pay a cent out of pocket and you’ll be able to put up your info or your pictures or your whatever.

The issue is this: Web hosting is very expensive for the hosting provider. They cannot afford to buy all those computers, all the software, the internet connections, hire all those people, and maintain them while providing 100% free services.

So they have to get their money somehow, even though you might pay nothing at all. How is this possible? Upsells, emails, and ads, basically. So let me give some examples:

The Free Hosting:

Tripod.com is a 100% free hosting service. You can sign up and be putting up a site within an hour. As you go through the signup process they will encourage you to sign up for their paid hosting service, buy a domain name, and sign up for various offers. None of which you have to do. They provide lots of templates to pick from and their website builder isn’t at all hard to use.

Once your site is up you’ll notice Tripod ads all over your site. For example, this Warcraft Rogue tips site I threw together. The two ad blocks at the top and the bottom of the page are Tripod’s. Since Tripod has been around for a long time with the same model I have to assume that their model works.

It’s not a bad way to get started, really. Most free hosts are similar. When the time comes for you to get more serious with your site you’ll want to move up to a paid solution.

DotEasy.com also offers free hosting but you’ll make a payment for a domain name or to transfer a domain name to their service. The upside is that you don’t get any of their ads on your site. This works out to about $3 a month which is about as cheap as hosting gets.

The best way to go, by far, if you really want to be free is Blogger.com. Blogger is owned by the mighty Google, which means a few things: 1) You’re not limited in how much stuff you add to your site and 2) it’s going to be around for awhile.

The only thing that Blogger adds to your site is a bar at the top of the page giving access to other blogger blogs. Here’s an example of one of their blogs. Yet another warcraft tips blog. The only thing that Blogger adds is the bar at the top. Everything else is yours.

So how does Blogger pay the bills? Google has the adsense program which allows you to put their adds on your site and you split the revenue.

One more note - You’ll never be able to run a high traffic site on the free hosts. Once you exceed a certain amount of traffic they’ll turn off your site until the bandwidth meter resets.

The exception? You can have a high traffic site with blogger. Some pretty popular blogs are on blogger, ranging from little Warcraft sites to very popular political sites.

Squidoo - Squidoo.com isn’t really a hosting service, but it’s a pretty nifty system. Absolutely 100% free and they do a revenue sharing system with the ads placed on your site. More about Squidoo.com.

Hubpages - Very similar to squidoo, 100% free, but a little stricter in what they allow. More on HubPages.

Weebly and WetPaint.com are two more free hosts that pretty much let you do your own thing with some pretty decent site builders, provide options for grabbing your own domain name, and so on.

There are some other issues with the free stuff, too. See below.

The Paid Hosting

The big advantage of paid hosting is that you have complete control over your site. No ads that aren’t yours, no bars at the top or bottom of your site, no hoops to jumps through.

Subject to the limitations of your host’s terms and conditions you have no limits to what you put on your site. Go crazy with the design, size, and content. You’ll also generally get a lot more in the way of features with paid hosting than with free hosting.

I gave up on free hosting a long time ago, with the exception of that Tripod site, but that’s just  there as a demo anyway. I do use Squidoo and HubPages a lot, though, as well as Blogger.

Getting a lot of traffic? Free hosts, as I mentioned above, will shut you down fast. Paid hosts will too, but you will be getting a lot more traffic than the freebies will put up with. The big sites pay a little, or a lot more, and can handle vast amounts of traffic. Also, if you’re gettin so much traffic that it’s an issue with your host they will have an upgrade path available.

So if you plan on building a somewhat professional site that gets a nice level of traffic and will maybe make you a few buxks then you want to go with the paid hosting. I’m using LiquidWeb, after firing my last few hosts, but there are a lot of hosting services out there and some may suit you better. I’ve also used 1and1.com and like them.

So why else to use paid hosting instead of Blogger, Squidoo, Hubpages, etc.? You’re less at the mercy of the system. For example: Google has been known to kill certain Blogger blogs. Usually these were junk or spam blogs, with garbage content, but some good blogs have been hit.

You are more free to do your own thing, limited only by your skill at building a site.

Also, sites like Squidoo and Hubpages occasionally change how their systems work. If you like the changes, great, if you don’t, well, you can alsways go elsewhere. With your own host you’re the one who’s always in charge.

Take a close look at what you want to do and choose accordingly. Some people stay entirely with Squidoo, others use several systems.

Welcome back!

Tags for this post: blogger, free hosts, hosting, hub pages, squidoo, weebly

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