I know most of you who are reading this might have a personal blog or any other form of personal online space (mailboxes excluded!). Ever thought of having your own free website with your own domain name? In the normal way, you would have to purchase a .com or similar domain from an online seller like yahoo, bravenet etc.. for around $10. Once you buy a domain, you can either go the hard way of setting up a server in your own house or go the easy way by hosting it in another webhost. But this easy way will require you to pay a yearly or monthly fee for maintaining your website. Here, I am showing you a method where you can create your own website for free : both hosting and getting the domain. You won't exactly get the same result as getting it by paying money. But you will be close.

Sign up at one of the free hosting services. You will have to be content with a subdomain, something like www.mywebsite.bravehost.com or www.mywebsite.freehostia.com. But we will get around this later. For now, sign up at one of the free hosting services (a huge list is available here) and be careful to choose one which allows scripts, PHP and FTP. Also the service should have at least 50 MB of workspace. Do not go for hosting services with POP3 e-mail accounts as this won't work with the plan stated here. I'd recommend signing up for something like freehostia.com.

Make your website. This is easier said than done because making an entire website is no one shot thing. Some services offer you templates and wizards but basically, a website should reflect your taste.That means it will be better if you can come up with your own themes, content etc... Create an index.html HTML file, this will be your homepage. You can name it whatever you want but index is the most commonly used name. Create your website. Tips and tricks on website creation can be found on various websites like RocketFace. Make your website out of different individual webpages linked together and organise them into folders. You can use a free commercial Website creator like N-vu to design your website easily. Once you organise them to folders, ready to be published, move towards the next step.

Learning HTML, PHP or CSS can be great as this can make you more comfortable with editing your website. There is a great tutorial here and here. Check them out!

To publish a website, you need to upload all these files into your sub-domain account. Download an FTP manager like FileZilla and connect it with your hosting account. Instructions on how to do this can be taken from the help manual of FileZilla. Once you are setup with the FTP manager, simply drag-and-drop the files between your account and your computer. This is where organisation comes to work. Remember in the previous step that told you to organise your webpages to folders? N-vu can help you make functional webpages organised into folders.

For example, a simple website can have the following files :

index.html

news.html

aboutme.html

mypicture.jpg

style.css

contactme.html

myhousemap.jpg

mylogo.jpg

mybackground.jpg

There can be much more than this, but for simplicity, let's consider this.You can organise the same files into folders like :

main/index.html

main/mylogo.jpg

main/mybackground.jpg

main/style.css

news/news.html

contact/contactme.html

contact/myhousemap.jpg

about/aboutme.html

about/mypicture.jpg

Organising files is easy using an FTP manager and it can help you change a specific webpage later with ease. Information on how to format links to work with folders can be seen here (HTML code). Once everything is done. Upload everything and then access your account. Set your homepage to index.html. Sometimes this is automatic but sometimes this should be set. The way to do this varies with different services. Please access the help section of the service if you have any doubts. Once this is done, Congratulations. You have your first professional-looking (hopefully) website complete with FTP on the web. Great! But shouldn't we do something about that long subdomain URL? Well, yes! Proceed to the next section.

There is a great service known as CO.NR which can give you a URL with a name such as www.mywebsite.co.nr and when a user go to this link, the service automatically redirects the user to your subdomain URL! What's more, with a technique known as URL cloaking, the web address on the Address Bar remains www.mywebsite.co.nr while the website is actually from your sub-domain! You can also access your folders in your subdomain with your new domain name. For example.

To access a webpage from www.mywebsite.freehostia.com/contact/contactme.html, you can set the domain to read www.mywebsite.co.nr/contact/contactme.html. But this might mean adjusting your links, but the final result will be terrific. Users accessing the website will not find it is hosted in a subdomain and the admin of the website is a cheapskate (:. They can also navigate around easily as any other website.

There are a lot of advantages to this system, mainly that

• IT'S COMPLETELY FREE! Not a penny is gone from your hands.
• FTP makes it easier to upload more files and edit them.
• Website is running 24 hours unlike a setup where you set up a web server in your house and the website is accessibe only when the server is running.
• Your own domain name. Not a subdomain URL!

The only disadvantage in this system is that it is completely dependent on the free hosting service and URL redirection service and the website will be up and running only when both these services are active. Always make a backup of your entire website in case the free subdomain service crashes. In that case, just get another subdomain service and rerun the website. You just have to edit the URL redirection a bit!

You can also make money from your website by putting in ads like from Google Adsense. Make sure to upload interesting content periodically to keep the traffic up. Tell your friends, your online buddies etc.. about your website and post a link to your site from your favourite forums and groups to generate traffic. Embed free Site Counters to monitor traffic. As you move on, you will become more and more better at this! Good Luck!