How Do I Own My Own website?

Buy a hosting plan from a reliable provider. Sure, you can use free hosting, but you get what you pay for. These will sometimes put their own ads on your pages or will not show your pages when bandwidth (total usage by all users of the service) is high.

Reputable hosting comes billed monthly from $5 to $30 per month depending on how much traffic you have coming to your pages and how much information you store on the host. Hosting bills sometimes give you a discount if you buy an annual contract. You can buy the lowest one and then upgrade it periodically as Cashmound demonstated. Some hosts will also offer a lifetime hosting package. I have a lifetime one with unlimited bandwidth (traffic), MYSQL (databases for running scripts) and domains, which I sure hope stays in business for my lifetime This is my second paid hosting account. You should shop around a bit before jumping on anything so you get the most value for your money.

After you have your hosting plan, you will want to buy a domain name. Most of the short simple ones are gone; so think of some two or three word runtogethers that represent what you are planning. It costs from $5 to $13 per year to own a domain name. There are lots of endings available to choose from, but the best one for business is “.com”. Your domain name is hosted on a domain name server (DNS) You will need to learn how to use the DNS host control panel to “point” it to the server for your pages. You can shop around for a good deal on a domain name. Sometimes there are special offers. I own two domain names, but if I don’t pay my annual fees, someone else will take them when they expire. That could mean they might benefit from all my hard work to get my domain names indexed and ranked in the search engines. You might want to shop in an expired domain name list to find a name that someone else has already gotten into Google and then didn’t renew their annual payment.

There is a learning curve with all this. You have to learn how to use the hosting control panel and how to build pages and how to optimize those pages to attract people to your site. Then you must promote your site. You can pay someone else to do a lot of it, but I find it’s a great hobby as I love making web pages and learning what I need to know along the way.

There are several ways to “own” a website. You can buy it and pay others to do the work, it can be a strictly business machine or your own artistic expression. If you just want to learn how, start small with a cheap account. Learn how to compose a page using an HTML editor, how to upload pages using a FTP software tool, how to install and make a script work, how to use an autoresponder. All the instructions are out on the web. Learn how to use Google or Yahoo to find what you want to know.

If you want to start cheap, I don’t recommend Angelfire, but rather a place like Awardspace.com There it’s more like a paid host experience. I use Dreamscape, but NVU is a very good free WYSIWYG HTML editor. If you want to do this then get started and make it happen. You build a tower by placing the first block. Start getting your tools together and learn how to use them. Even if you decide to buy a website, you need to know how to edit it and FTP your pages.

Unless you buy something huge and expensive right away it’s going to take some time to get a website popular enough to make a nice income for you. So be patient while you learn how to grow your site. You will be expanding your abilities as you go.

- so what will the topic of your website be?