Making a personal website is so easy and inexpensive! I literally bought a domain with my name for $1.24 for an entire year! That's hosting included! GoDaddy.com is who I use for domains and hosting. The only problem I've ever come across is unrecognized filetypes. I tried to host iPhone ringtones on a site of mine but the m4r extension threw the server off and acted like the files didn't exist. So I just zipped them and reuploaded them. The cheapest domains are .info domains. They were 89 cents when I bought mine. With taxes and some fees it brought the total to $1.24. Now they offer paid hosting, but their economy (free) hosting has plenty of storage and bandwidth for a personal presence on the web. The only thing is, economy hosting has ads. This was very annoying to me. Especially since I used a few 'position:absolute's in my CSS and the ads pretty much threw everything off. I found a workaround though. And it took me a while but it's so simple.
When removing ads, all you have to do is add one short line after all your page's HTML code. Literally right after the closing </html> tag, just add:
<textarea style="display:none;"> Even if you use a program to design your webpages, you can employ this workaround. You don't have to know anything about HTML to learn how to use this trick. Just open your page with notepad and add the code above at the bottom of all the code. Pretty easy right? You see, the ads are added on the fly. Godaddy doesn't edit your webpages to have the ads built in. Godaddy adds the ads when someone pulls up your page.
So by adding an open-ended textarea, the browser thinks everything added after the textarea is just well text so it doesn't process it as the JavaScript it should. Plus with the display set to none on the textarea you won't see anything at all. By adding this to all the pages you want to be ad-free, without purchasing a hosting plan, you can have a much more professional-looking site without all the cost.
As for the hosting, there are two different types of servers Godaddy offers. Windows and Linux. So if you have ASP.net pages get windows or if you're PHP get Linux. I go with Windows since it handles both pretty well. Now as for content, well that's up to you. I use Dreamweaver to make my webpages. I code because I think it's easier than messing with dreamweaver's individualized settings. But there are several designer programs out there. If you would like to learn HTML I'd recommend W3schools.com. They have some amazing tutorials and they are a great resource when learning to code in HTML.
Even if you don't need a website, they're so cheap, it's like why not? I mainly did it so I could have my name as an email address. But I have also made a webpage for my dog and a fake movie studio! It's a hobby for me. Anyway, I hope this helped if you were looking for a cheap place to get a website!
