Hey all, is there anyway to get your website hosted for free (this is for a non-unicyclist who doesn’t want something like what Gilby offers) and register a domain name for it that is short and sweet?
Or do all free webhosting sites not offer this, as it may be one of the many perks to paying for the site?
Basically…can you pay to register your domain name to a freely hosted site?
Thanks (I have no idea where else to post this, and as I spend quite a bit of time here…)
Why would you want to pay to get a domain name to a free site? I mean, if you pay for a name for a free site, that’s like- I dunno- an oxymoron, or something.
well, to run a site not for free, it costs about $20 per month (give or take)
to run a free site, it costs nothing, but you get a long ridiculous URL to contend with.
To register a domain name gives you a nice custom name for only about $25 for 2 years (again, give or take)
You can use any one of the free web hosts, and just using url cloaking for the domain name, many registrars offer this as standard, else people like www.zoneedit.com will do it for free.
All popups, restrictions, etc. of your web host still apply though.
Seems to be quite common for people to get a .tk address… you can get them for free, somehow, somewhere… and then point that at some random free webspace.
Phil
Ohh, I see what you mean now. You don’t want the whole http://www.geocities.com/name/index/otherstuff/makeitstop.html, right?
You can’t get a domain name for free, I know that. At www.doteasy.com, you can get a fairly cheap domain, though.
That should be www.doteasy.com
Klaas Bil
Brian-
Portland Communications gives you 15Mb of space, 100Mb of monthly bandwidth, has no banners, no pop-ups, and has FTP access all for free. I posted this in the Hell on Wheel movie thread. My wife has a website for her art work there. She picked part of the url
which you can see from the location bar. They add the “port5” at the end of your choice for url name so it’s not so obtrusive.
www.dot.tk
they give you free names:
www.yourname.tk
short and sweet, i believe there is one popup?
Thank you everybody
Beware of free stuff. You get what you pay for. Always keep a backup of whatever’s on your Web site on your local computer, just in case.
My own ISP, formerly known as FeaturePrice.com, recently went out of business after a long downhill slide in quality of service. It is in the process of being taken over by Atlantic.net, though they haven’t communicated with me yet. My site (and email) were down for a few days, but now they seem solid again.
One of the problems people were having with FeaturePrice was that the domain names they had bought through the company weren’t being released to them when they tried to leave (because of the bad service). Beware of brokerage companies that sell domain names but don’t set you up as the technical contact for them.
But domain names are pretty cheap. I highly recommend registering one yourself, separate from your hosting company. This was what I did, so it was never in danger.
I’m surprised nobody mentioned hosting a site yourself. I guess that isn’t free either, unless you have good Web server software, and a machine you want to leave on 24/7 and have vulnerable to all the stuff that can attack it. I’d rather pay someone else to handle that.
Redirecting your domain to a free site can be done pretty cheaply (if not free). The drawback is, of course that your domain will never been seen in the URL bar on the browser, and all links within your site will have to use the “ugly” URL anyway.
Or, you can set up a frameset instead of a redirect. Then your URL will always be there, but you won’t be able to give out links to pages within your site (frames are should be avoided whenever possible).
Or, find a friend who has a domain-hosted site with extra space, who will let you use some of theirs. Two of my friends do this:
Good luck!