Many friends asked me, how did I
start building my personal website,
procured my domain name and hosted
website. Here are the answers, hope
this will be helpful to you
too.
If you do not understand any
terms used in this article, do
visit
HowStuffWorks.com.
FREE Web Hosting
Started with FREE web hosting
provided by
freeservers.com.
I created an account,
spillai.itgo.com, with
Freeservers.com. Freeservers.com
provided 12MB of web space,
512MB of monthly data transfer,
256KB file size, etc.. This was
good enough for starting a
personal home page. Most of the
free hosting services display
advertisement in your web pages
- afterall, nothing is really
free in this world!
Google directory on web hosting
has a list of FREE web hosting
providers. Also check out
Web Hosting Q 'n' A.
You may also want to check out
DOT.TK, which offers
FREE .TK domain names.
PAID Web Hosting, Domain Name
& E-mail
In the beginning, I paid $20 to
namezero.com for registering my
domain name
spillai.com
for an year, 10 MB of e-mail
with web and POP access and DNS
management tools. Web hosting
was NOT included. You can setup
you@yourname.com e-mail ids.
Later I found that
Catalog.com
provides the best hosting
package. I transferred my domain
registration to Catalog.com and
enjoyed FREE web hosing, with no
advertisements! I would
recommend
Catalog.com
or
DomainAvenue.com for
registering domain name, 50MB
hosting space, 1 e-mail
(you@yourdomain.com), PHP and
MySQL, FTP and Webmail - all for
just $35 per year.
Later I decided to make a
dynamic ASP based website for my
hometown, Ananthapuri.com.
My research lead to
Uplinkearth.com. Micro plan
provided by uplinkearth is the
cheapest and reliable Windows web
hosting I have ever seen - Domain
registration, 150MB disk
space, 10 e-mail
(you@yourdomain.com) with both IMAP
and web interface, FTP, ASP and
Microsoft Access database - all for
$80 per year! Fast response
from support. I believe, this is
the best value domain registration
& hosting package you could
find out in the web.
FREE Web Authoring
All web hosting services allow you
to upload your files to the web
server. So, you can create pages in
your computer, test it and then
upload.
Dream weaver(trial version) and
HTML-Kit are good web
authoring tools,
check out more FREE tools. I
did not use any special tools, used
TextPad
instead.
FREE Useful
Resources
some other websites you might want
to check out.
-
DOT.TK
- Get
yourname.tk
domain for FREE!
-
Freeservers.com - FREE HTML
Hosting.
-
Brinkster.com - FREE
Microsoft Technology hosting
(ASP, ASP.NET, MS Access
database)
-
Sitemeter.com - FREE
detailed visitor counter, with
a lot of statistics.
-
HTML Primer at
HTMLGoodies.com - What is
HTML?
-
ASP101.com - What is
ASP?
