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Where to Make Your Own Free Website
by Michael Dance
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Overview
Website hosting and domain names are more affordable than ever, but many people would still rather go the totally free route. While most free website services have a few notable drawbacks, people wishing to create a Web presence for their small business, to post their wedding photos or to start a blog have many tools at their disposal that are completely free of charge.
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Free Blogging Hosts
A number of free blogging platforms exist; through them, you can create a blog (short for "web log") in under 15 minutes. The big names are Blogger and WordPress, but there are many popular alternatives, such as Tumblr. All of these sites provide you with simple tools to customize your blog and write new posts, but all of them host your blog on their own domain name. For example, the address of your Tumblr blog would be yoursite.tumblr.com.
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Free Website Hosts
Free hosting options aren't limited only to bloggers. Weebly.com can help you create blogs or more traditional websites and offers unlimited storage space. Webs.com (formerly FreeWebs) boasts 300 website templates to make all sorts of websites, including forums and online stores. And through Google Sites, you can make your own wikis, or sites that anyone can edit (such as Wikipedia).
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Domain Names
Traditionally, when creating a website, you have to buy a domain name and a hosting plan, and you receive a professional-looking address such as yoursite.com. Most of the free web hosts listed above, however, allow you to use your own domain name in conjunction with their free hosting services. For example, instead of paying the $10 per year fee for a domain name (from a domain name broker such as GoDaddy.com) and then the $7 per month fee for professional hosting, you can avoid that hosting fee and pay only the $10. The result is a site that looks professional--yoursite.com instead of yoursite.weebly.com, for example--but without any of the typical hosting costs.
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Free Professional Hosting Services
Many professional web hosts offer free hosting plans. These plans don't come with site-building tools or blog platforms but rather a professional set of hosting features, such as MySQL databases, e-mail addresses and subdomains. Often these come with heavy storage restrictions or mandatory ads, and you still have to buy a domain name, but many options exist, such as FreeHostia.com. The website Free-Webhosts (see the Resources below) lists and reviews over 100 such services.
