How to get your own Website for under $15 a year in 3 Simple Steps

By Ali Zain
Posted Wednesday, June 23, 2004

Yes in today’s article I’ll show you how you can have your own personal or even a business website for under $15 bucks a year plus that includes a one year of domain registration and hosting with all the bells and whistles.

For some people just thinking of designing a website and creating their online presence is a hectic thing. That was just a thing of the past. Almost every individual in I.T. field should have a site where they can showcase their skills and build credibility.

Before we start creating our first site, we have to know certain things that make up our actual website. There are several elements involved in a site. Every website on the net needs to be hosted. Just like a file or a document has to be in your hard rive before you can view it on your screen. Same way, a website needs to be hosted on a server. We also need to register the site with a domain registry so anyone can access our site. Then comes the easiest part, we will need a template to design our site.

So how can you build your own website for under fifteen bucks a year? The answer is simple. First lets design our site. For that go to (http://www.freewebtemplates.com) and select one of their free templates. Some free lancers and web designers submit these but have a link on the template at the bottom to use their free template. Of course if you already know how to design a site, then you don’t really need this.

Once you’ve downloaded the template that you like and modified the HTML with your favorite editor like FrontPage or Dreamweaver.

Hint: Go to download.com and click on HTML editors to download the free one’s.

Save the modified template as index.html in a new folder on your desktop. Make sure to put all the images in that same folder.

Second step would be to host our site out there on the Internet. For that the best low cost and reliable host that I’ve always hosted all my sites is (http://dayanahost.vb7.net). Their hosting is rated #1 for low cost and reliable hosts on Hosting Rated Sites. For only $5.99 per year, they provide you with 10MB of disk space, 1GB of Bandwidth for transfer, 2 POP3 email accounts, 1 MySQL Database, 2 Sub domains e.g. something.yoursite.com and lots of other features.

Once you have the hosting setup, all you have to do is just upload the template that you saved on your desktop through some FTP program (e.g. WSFTP) to you’re your site.

Our third and last step in building our website is to register our site on the Internet. For that you would need to go to (http://www.godaddy.com) and get your domain registered for only $8.95 a year. They also provide you with my features like free ownership change, domain forwarding and domain locking. Once you’ve registered the domain and updated the name servers field provided by the hosting company (http://dayanahost.vb7.net) then your site should be available on the net in the next 48-72 hours.

Let’s see our total costs now:

1- Web Template = $0

2- Hosting Cost = $5.99

3- Domain Cost = $8.95

Total Site Costs = $14.94

So that’s all there’s to it. You get your own personal or business site in 3 steps and for less than 15 bucks.

About the Author
Ali Zain is the webmaster and president of VB7.net, the premier site on the net for free I.T. Training. Subscribe to his site's newsletter at (http://www.vb7.net) for some of the best Tech Articles ever written on Net. You'll also receive best I.T. Advice, tips-n-tricks newsletter and other goodies