Building your own website can be an easy and fun experience. There are a number of easy tools available to help you create your own website.

The first thing you'll need to do is to get yourself a domain name of some sort. This makes it easy to direct people to your website.  If you want a standard domain name you can register one through our website by going to our Domain Registration Area. Alternatively you can get a free domain name through the dyndns.org website.  This service will allow you to use a subdomain of one of their domain names and direct it to your website. They have several easy to remember domain names such as homeip.net.  Using this example your website could be yourname.homeip.net.  Of course this is not as nice as having yourname.com but it's still a free option to having your own ip for your own website.

Once you have a domain name you'll need to get some sort of a web host.  A host is simply a computer connected to the Internet that can store you website and display it for your visitors. Hosting is available in a variety of formats and types.  For a small personal website your best option is to use free hosting, or one of the low cost hosting options available such as ours.

Free Hosting

Free hosting is available from a variety of sources.  Google offers free web hosting here at Google Sites. Simply register on their site and you can create your free website.  You can then point your domain name which you have already setup to that site so people can easily find your web pages.

Once you've signed up at the google sites page you'll be guided through how to create your website quickly and easily.

Paid Hosting

If you can get free hosting why would you pay for it?  Well free hosting is not always completely free.  Many times free hosting requires you to host ads or is limited in the number of visitors that can use it.  Mainly free hosting limits the technologies that may be used to run your website.  Most times a free host will only allow HTML web pages.  This limits the complexity of the web site you can create.  Although creating large websites using only HTML is possible it becomes a lot of work and normaly its better to switch over to some sort of content management system CMS such as joomla if you plan to have more than 5 or 10 indiviadual web pages.  The advantages to using a CMS is that all you web pages are easily organized and linked together using the CMS.

Content management system however require more work from the sever since they typically use databases and run on the host using technology such at PHP. These services are normally not available from free hosting services.

If you'd like to obtain web hosting to run your CMS see our web hosting options here.  Paid hosting starts from as little as about $3.00 per month.

Web Hosting