Free websites? looking for own domain name

I've looked at a few "free" domain sites that offer you your very own FREE website! The only cost is when they tell you to get your credit card out after you've just taken half n hour to sign up..

Are there any real free websites out there, or close enough too?
 
Sure, if you don't want your own domain name. Wordpress, blogspot, myspace, all of those social networking ones. And you can get yourdomain.someoneelsesdomain.com in heaps of places too.

Domain names cost $9 or so if you want your own though.
 
It must be able to process payments through Paypal and send take/send automatic orders, so not Myspace or anything like that. It needs to be independant.
 
You can put paypal on any old website, heaps of wordpress blogs have donate buttons, for example.

Why can't you cough up the $50 or so it would cost for a year's hosting and a domain name that is entirely your own? Why do you *need* free?
 
As I'd rather buy a slab with the $50 :D Or take the missus out for dinner or something. I need it to be easy to use, I don't want to have to become a web designer to sell something online.
Cheers!
 
Last edited:
You can buy a .info domain from godaddy for 89 cents ... and a years unlimited hosting on ebay for $4.30 ...

That still leaves you $44 for beer :D
 
Yes there is no point in bothering with free domain names and websites, you will spend far more time with all the issues associated with this. As mentioned, domain names can cost less than a $1 or for a .com less then $10 for 1 year so the cost should not be a factor. As for hosting, you can pay most hosting companies monthly for less than $5 or $6 for a basic plan.
 
Thanks Monsoon.
Can anyone point me to an appropriate company?

I like the sound of $5 per month, and easy to use.
I require an easy to use layout, don't want to design myself.
It needs to be able to easily process orders, and send auto email.

Thank you.
 
You're looking for a templated kind of host then, not just a regular host. A lot of hosts come with some kind of ecommerce software built into them that you can set up. Most come with something like wordpress built in too.

You might want to look into open source software for an online shop too, I assume this is what you are trying to do?

Once you've got your software installed, you need to find a nice theme to use if you don't want to do your own.

Meanwhile, go off and try and register your domain ... if the .com is taken, the .somethingelse might just be free ... I'm still stoked I got photographicdictionary.com, I was totally convinced it would be taken :D
 
The traffic limits tend to be so low its not funny, mainly. Most of them are < 5G a month and nowhere near the 3 billion G you get for $5 overseas. And its rare to see an Australian host for less than $20 a month, although I'm sure they exist.

Its been a while since I looked but last time I checked I couldn't afford anything Australian.

Edit: Ok, since its been so long since I looked, a google search turned up about 20 hosts that cost $36-55 a month and one that cost $8, which stood out like a sore thumb. And a few at $3 with huge amounts of transfer that are clearly just reselling overseas hosting.

We pay about $20 a month at the moment and are very, VERY happy with our US host.
 
http://www.quadrahosting.com.au/hosting/unix.html

$10pm for 5G
$20pm for 10GB

From experience, unless you are serving large amounts of multimedia, you will rarely require more than this anyway.

Yes, it is of the order of 20x cheaper to get US based hosting, but why bother if you don't need it? Unless your audience is almost exclusively outside Australia, or you are generating in excess of about 50GB per month in traffic, I see no real reason to go offshore.

For someone looking to host a "free" site, they obviously aren't expecting to be running high volumes of traffic. Why not keep it on-shore and support our local hosting industry?

Avoids potential legal complications too - did you know that the location of the webserver can determine the legal jurisdiction in the case of problems with site content?
 
That site is about $50 a month as well for us (or $5 for US hosting) ... we serve mostly to the US and India, for some reason. Almost none to Australia, which is why I get complaints I can't spell airplane, color and jello. And lets not discuss bell peppers, teeter totters and playground slides :rolleyes:

For someone wanting a very cheap website I'd go US hosting at $2.95 a month or something, with a point and click shopping cart. Those sites are fine until you actually want responsiveness when you get a few 1000 page views a day.
 
Thanks Monsoon.
Can anyone point me to an appropriate company?

I like the sound of $5 per month, and easy to use.
I require an easy to use layout, don't want to design myself.
It needs to be able to easily process orders, and send auto email.

Thank you.

Try some of these but maybe check out Webhosting forums http://www.webhostingtalk.com and ask around there or read reviews first.

http://www.hostlane.com/
http://www.hostgator.com/

look around for coupons and you might get a discount too.
 
Webhostingtalk is great. Its where I got the recommendation for my current host (I was looking for one that wasn't cheap and nasty and was actually reliable after being burnt by a couple of cheap ones). And I really like my current host, been with them a couple years now.
 
What has'nt been stated is what you planning on doing with it.
If your just looking for something to play with and a buy it now paypal button then an aussie server is pretty cheap at $10 a mth and it's nice to be able to talk to a person on the phone if any issues arise.
And if I remember correctly someone from quadra is a member here.
One problem wit US servers is that their maintenance time are always our usual biz times. Pity they don"t seem to have Fantastico.
If your target audience is US based then you can use someone like hostgator for a few bux cheaper.

FTR every web host over sells their data & capacity by working out averages.
If you go over the average for long, you'll be either suspended or required to go on a dearer plan.
It's nice to think you have 5gig of bandwith, but most likely be thrown out if you have 2gig for 3 mths in a row. But that's what may happen with many providers.
I've had good experiences with Hostway (for asp.net & ruby on rails) & Hostgator (php, mysql stuff). Blue Central have been ok also for hosting .asp SQL sites.
 
It's nice to think you have 5gig of bandwith, but most likely be thrown out if you have 2gig for 3 mths in a row. But that's what may happen with many providers.
Eww. We were running at a constant 9-12G a month for aaaaaaaages but the last few months I've been promoting the sites a bit more and we're now on 17G a month and rising fast. I hope our host remains nice to us ... they're holding up to the extra traffic beautifully but we're still running very low traffic websites in the grand scheme of things. http://wordsbycat.com is currently getting 15 visitors a day! Phwoar!

http://www.pair.com/services/web_hosting/advanced.html we're on << that plan.
 
Back
Top