Often times teachers and friends want to set up their own website. You can certainly use existing services like Blogger, WordPress, Google Sites, PBWorks, to create a web presence. But having your own place on the web, that you control and set up is easy and rather cost-friendly (as long as you don’t post something that generates millions of visits). Popularity has its costs.  Also, you can escape advertisements and speed/upload limitations that exist on free services.

To create your own website, you need to understand the difference between domains and hosting.

The first thing about creating a website is creating a domain. A domain is a web address for your website. For example, this site is hosted on the domain name: riverflowing.com I pay about $8 per year for this address. You have to find an address that is available and original.  Usually a combination of two to three words works.  Domain names are available through web hosts (see below). Once you own the domain name, you can go into the settings and automatically forward it to any address on the web. It can be an web location and might have a long address. It’s easy to tell some one to visit coolcatposters.com as opposed to a long web address like sites.google.com/site/skram. Some people buy all versions of the same address (.org, .com, .net), but remember that will cost about $30 per year to renew each variation of the address. A year-long domain registration is typically free with a hosting contract. Of course, you will have to pay for future years.

The second ingredient of creating a website is hosting. Hosting is space on the web where you can upload and save your web site and related files. This may include images, documents, videos, etc. Hosting costs about $10 per month for a limited amount of space.  Most hosts are shared servers. This means that you will have your website on a server along with possibly hundreds of other users.  You won’t know that you are on the same server and will have no interaction with the other sites.  However, performance may be affected if you have multiple people overloading one server.  As a result, finding good hosting is never easy. You may have heard of GoDaddy.com because of its advertisements, but I never have been fond of its user interface. I’ve used a variety of different services, including Omnis and currently MDDHosting.com. Once you have a space to store your website files, you can then direct your domain name to location of your files on your host.