How to Set Up a Free Website

Everyone, probably, at some point or another, has wanted to have a website. With the decision to start a website, there comes a variety of decisions one has to make. One of the main ones is money...and the lack thereof.

So, where does one begin when one decides that he or she wants to set up a website for free?

There are two main points that should be considered before beginning:

The hosting: who is going to provide the bandwidth and storage space for your site?

The domain: who is going to provide you with a domain name to use with your site?

Also to be considered are the content and interactivity of your site. The latter is not really necessary, though it does serve to make your site more likely to be re-visited.

A good place that I have used in the past to establish a nice web presence is www.gigahive.com. They give you quite a bit of storage and bandwidth, for free, and probably more than most other free web hosting sites you'll find on the web. They offer several impressive layouts to which you can make your own modifications, or you can go at it solo if you have some coding experience, and build your layout from scratch. They even allow you to put ads on your free site so you can at least generate some revenue. GigaHive is run by very reasonable people.

If you'd rather have a forum, www.mypunbb.com is a good place to set one up. They offer a free forum, hosted by them, with as much bandwidth as you need. The forum comes with a variety of customizable features, and you can bend it to almost any purpose you can think of.

Another place to get a free forum is www.invisionfree.com. They've become extremely widely used, now, and have over a dozen dedicated servers keeping thousands upon thousands of free forums running. Their forum software, too, is extremely customizable. Note: they don't like you to put ads on your free forum, unless you send them a small amount of money (to the best of my recollection, it's 5 dollars for 5000 pageviews, and you can pay by PayPal or credit card online) to remove the small ads they automatically place on your site.

A good place to get a domain name is www.freedomain.co.nr. You give them the address of your site and the address that you would like to assign to that site, and within a few minutes you register and are approved. The domain they give you is pretty clean-cut: it's just a www.whatever-your-site-name-is.co.nr. This is much nicer than many other 'domain redirection' services and similar things. There is a small catch, though; they require that you place a small (about thumb-sized) banner on your site that directs to www.freedomain.co.nr. It's a small price to pay, though, for the excellent service they provide. And you can put the banner at the bottom of your site, if you want; it's all the same to them, so long as it's there.

With these sites, and a small, or non-existent, knowledge of HTML, it becomes very possible to establish a nice web presence.