Host A Website - For Free

11 Jul 2011

I get asked a lot by friends and family members how to cheaply setup and run self build websites. It's not always the easiest thing to explain that hosting does cost cold, hard, cash, normally at least €50 a year, then you need to add on €10-€30 a year for a domain name to go on top of that. However, there is a cheaper, simple way to get around atleast the hosting costs.

Your Domain Name - Emails & Host Environments

In the past, you simply needed hosting to use a domain name, process emails and keep your website files online. Although it is easy to setup a domain name (relatively easy) with Gmail to process emails, it can become a dodgy affair when trying to change settings to also reflect a website host, therefore, for the sake of this article - I recommend you continue to use your old email or setup a gmail account for your new website, and not play with domain names!

 

Getting Up and Running

This part of the process can be difficult, so I have tried to break it down into easy to understand steps:

• Buy a domain name from a company such as www.letshost.ie or www.blacknight.ie (these are both Irish, and hence support .ie applications, both also allow you to change DNS settings as required.
  
  
• Then setup a DropBox account (www.dropbox.com) - technically this is a hack around approach, but avoids messy advertisements, bandwidth restrictions and is easy to upload files.
  
  
• Go to your DropBox (having installed it, and logged in on your PC / Laptop). Create a folder in your "Public Folder" (see DropBox help to explain this concept.
  
  
• Put any website files you have created (using Frontpage, Dreamweaver, or good old hard HTML editing) into this new folder.
  
  
• Make sure your proposed homepage file is saved as index.html (it just has to be!) and right click in Dropbox to get the public url for this file.
  
  
• Ask your domain registrar to setup a CNAME entry from your domain to that URL (if they won't or have trouble [keep in mind, it's beyond what they are paid for] contact a web minded person to get things going - it's only 5 minutes work for someone in the know). (Keep this in mind: http://wiki.dropbox.com/TipsAndTricks/HostWebsites )
  
  
  
• After a few hours (normally around 12 hours) your website, as located in your DropBox public folder should now appear at your www.youdomain.ie domain name!

Notes

• This method is only recommended for non-important personal projects, always keep a backup of your website files on your PC.
• Dropbox may delete your files at any moment, it's a free service, sometimes, it's just though luck.
• Never host dangerous or illegal materials on your website, you will be held liable.
• If you intend on hosting videos, or massive files, try a service like YouTube or Vimeo (or similar for images, etc) over doing your bandwidth allowance will probably result in your account being suspended.

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