Hosting a website, or hosting anything for that matter requires preservation. Not all hosting solutions are the same. Sure, for ex) I might get the conveinence of going to namecheap.com/wordpress if I’m deciding to set up a online business, personal blog, etc… It’s good for a lot of things for the average normal user but if you want more customization for a more advanced user someone will want a cpanel and have a hosting provider. The prices will vary and for hosting I was able to find a mean of 64$USD per year which a lot of them include the domain with the hosting but usually it’s only for a year. So benefit of doubt, we’ll roughly gather the yearly cost being around 75$USD depending on the type of domain chosen. Hosting providers are essentially giving you permission and the nesessary keys to access your account over there servers but while it may be conveinent you’re hoping they are taking the nesessary precautions to safe guard your data and protect your information in any case of a server wipe or account lock out. Nothing sucks more when you think you have something in safe keepings and you come back after a long time to realise that your stuff is no longer there. For the most part the average user isn’t really making a website; well, they might want to but they arn’t thinking of hosting and bandwidth and servers and yadayadayada… plus not everyone who is starting a website isn’t generally trying to make any profit from it. So, the point I’m trying to get at is that if you’re looking for a quick way to get a website and for on a budget I would suggest a service like tumblr, blogger, weebly, or wordpress.com. With these options you’ll actually be given a sub domain (ex: myblog.domain.com). If that is a deal breaker to you, the options provided will most likely allow you to set up your domain (whoever you purchased it from) and link it to your blog. Now, if your looking for an easy start ecommerce website I’d recommend squareup.com which offers a free store front option along with any wordpress.org hosting has free alternatives making your site a ecommerce site but again will require a hosting provider. If you’re a more technical savy user I would recommend either self hosting, purchase a hosting provider, or just purchase the domain name and find a free or cheap alternative hosting provider. Since, I’m on this budget streak I want to mention infinityfree because they do offer free web hosting with a cpanel and easy software installation for things like; wordpress, rss feed aggregator, ecommerce, and more! Like, I mentioned before in the post just link up your domain name you already have. Another option for hosting goes is to set up an account with github. Given you still get a sub domain ex) mywebsite.github.io but, like I said before you can also link your domain name with your github account that will act as your free hosting provider. Now, this is for more of a intermidiate techy user and to note everything posted on github will be publicly viewable to anyone if you’re planning on using it as a website then yes, you’d have to make your respository public. So, there is definately some considerations to be made and all depends on what your website intent is for. If your goal to be heavier intensive server side operations like databases, and php, i’d recommend hosting or self hosting. Again, this is for the advanced tech person. If your an average user and the goal is to make a website but on a budget I recommend the free alternative subdomains. Github option is overall relatively easy it just takes some articles to read and follow through the tutorials to set up I’d follow the github-pages on screen tutorial the set up is probably the safest option for a less technical savy user as there is two options for pushing/getting git repositories. The one tutorial that follows github-pages and everything is done through the web browser whereas the more techy tutorials involves, installing git (github-pages caps your upload and will not upload certain files when using the web browser github-pages) while git lets a user upload like 100GB of storage. *Don’t quote me on that. You must install jekyll and other ruby dependencies.–Don’t get me wrong this is my favorite option second to self hosting but just takes a longer learning curve. Lastly, I would ‘DYOR’ and search up cheap hosting solutions or other alternative subdomains to get a easy free website started. YECK, we’re in such a weird digital space now you could probably ChatGPT it and get some crazy results!

I will post a article on setting up github-pages(easy way) and creating a sub.github.io url that we’ll link to a domain. That’s all in the next post, thanks.