# cheapest way to set up a small website? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [June 19, 2009, 6:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cheapest-way-to-set-up-a-small-website/500314 "2009-06-19T18:34:36Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 15\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Arnold\_Winkelried](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/3d9bf3/32.png) [@Arnold\_Winkelried](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Arnold_Winkelried)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2009, 6:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cheapest-way-to-set-up-a-small-website/500314/1 "2009-06-19T18:34:36Z")
What is the cheapest way to set up a small website, if you don’t necessarily need your own domain name? Right now, with my ISP, I have a domain home.myisp.tld/~myusername (the real URL is the one listed in my profile) but near the end of the month I am always over my bandwith limit. My bandwith limits are very modest but my ISP doesn’t give me much for free. I would be happy with [almostfreedomain.com/myname](http://almostfreedomain.com/myname) as the URL for my website. All I would want to do is post straight HTML along with images. A bare-bones webpage. I don’t like having any advertisements on my site, which I imagine rules out all the free services. Any recommendations? ---
**Author:** ![Kinthalis](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kinthalis/32/16084_2.png) [@Kinthalis](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kinthalis)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2009, 6:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cheapest-way-to-set-up-a-small-website/500314/2 "2009-06-19T18:56:42Z")
What exactly do you mean by cheap? What is your budget? The actual registration of your domain name is cheap. You can buy one for as little as $3 per year. The hosting is another matter. ---
**Author:** ![ZipperJJ](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/zipperjj/32/211_2.png) [@ZipperJJ](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ZipperJJ)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2009, 6:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cheapest-way-to-set-up-a-small-website/500314/3 "2009-06-19T18:58:10Z")
I think the cheapest/most recommended host these days is [1and1.com](http://1and1.com) for $3.99/month. There may be cheaper place but if you are doing your own HTML you might actually find them more frustrating because they require you to use weird “web page editors.” ---
**Author:** ![Arnold\_Winkelried](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/3d9bf3/32.png) [@Arnold\_Winkelried](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Arnold_Winkelried)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2009, 7:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cheapest-way-to-set-up-a-small-website/500314/4 "2009-06-19T19:03:31Z")
I have a couple of websites I do where I pay $10/month = $120/year. I was thinking of something like $10 or $20 a year. But [1and1.com](http://1and1.com) is pretty cheap. I’ll take a look at them. Thanks ZipperJJ. Kinthalis, where can you get a domain name for $3/year? ---
**Author:** ![arseNal](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/ecae2f/32.png) [@arseNal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/arseNal)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2009, 7:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cheapest-way-to-set-up-a-small-website/500314/5 "2009-06-19T19:07:39Z")
If your bandwidth requirements are really that low, why don’t you host the server yourself and just use one of those free dynamic DNS services (like [no-ip.org](http://no-ip.org)) to point to your home IP? ---
**Author:** ![Arnold\_Winkelried](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/3d9bf3/32.png) [@Arnold\_Winkelried](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Arnold_Winkelried)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2009, 7:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cheapest-way-to-set-up-a-small-website/500314/6 "2009-06-19T19:12:57Z")
arseNal: because what I understand about networking will fit in a thimble; because I have no idea how I would make this work with my home DSL / wireless router / 4-switch setup; because that means that I would need to leave a computer turned on all the time, and I don’t have spare computers lying all around the house. I have one PC and a laptop. If I leave the house for a while (e.g. short trip) I turn everything off. ---
**Author:** ![anson2995](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/c77e96/32.png) [@anson2995](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/anson2995)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2009, 8:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cheapest-way-to-set-up-a-small-website/500314/7 "2009-06-19T20:33:52Z")
There are free hosts like [Google Sites](http://www.google.com/sites/help/intl/en/overview.html) or [Blogger](http://blogger.com) that let you post stuff through a content management system. They’re free, don’t require ads, and are great if you don’t know or want to learn HTML. If you want to get more advanced and design your own page templates, that’s possible too. ---
**Author:** ![sailor](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/a587f6/32.png) [@sailor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/sailor)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2009, 8:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cheapest-way-to-set-up-a-small-website/500314/8 "2009-06-19T20:38:22Z")
> [@ZipperJJ](#): > > I think the cheapest/most recommended host these days is [1and1.com](http://1and1.com) for $3.99/month. I got a cheap package with 1&1 for something like $30 for the first year and it includes the domain, POP3 email, etc. I am quite happy as I just used FTP to upload the whole site and they have all sorts of tools that tell you what traffic you had etc. Works pretty well. ---
**Author:** ![Mangetout](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mangetout/32/19_2.png) [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2009, 9:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cheapest-way-to-set-up-a-small-website/500314/9 "2009-06-19T21:59:08Z")
One way to keep the bandwidth in trim is to host the images off site. I do this with my site, hosting my images at [imageshack](http://www.imageshack.us/)and just embedding them. It’s free - the only slight disadvantages are: – occasionally, an individual image will become unavailable for some reason, so I have to upload a fresh copy and edit the page to point at the new one. – there are rules about how you should insert the images, and all of them involve misuse of the alt tag (to advertise their service, rather than what it’s supposed to be for, which is top provide a meaningful text alternative to the image in cases where it cannot or will not be displayed) ---
**Author:** ![Troy\_McClure\_SF](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/troy_mcclure_sf/32/4150_2.png) [@Troy\_McClure\_SF](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Troy_McClure_SF)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2009, 10:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cheapest-way-to-set-up-a-small-website/500314/10 "2009-06-19T22:06:59Z")
> [@Mangetout](#): > > One way to keep the bandwidth in trim is to host the images off site. I do this with my site, hosting my images at [imageshack](http://www.imageshack.us/)and just embedding them. I use Flickr to host images for my site, which I will shamelessly plug [here](http://goldengatebeerblog.wordpress.com/). Of course most of my image content is gonna be photos I’ve taken, and are already on my Flickr. Easy embedding/linking code, whose alt tag defaults to the photo title, plus it automatically resizes photos. Sounds like any of the typical blog sites could do you well- Blogger, Tumblr (especially easy), WordPress, LiveJournal, etc. I picked WordPress for mine for an extra bit of customization, but Tumblr does 90% of what WP does and it’s barely harder than drag-and-drop. ---
**Author:** ![Arnold\_Winkelried](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/3d9bf3/32.png) [@Arnold\_Winkelried](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Arnold_Winkelried)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2009, 10:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cheapest-way-to-set-up-a-small-website/500314/11 "2009-06-19T22:20:55Z")
> [@Mangetout](#): > > One way to keep the bandwidth in trim is to host the images off site. The funny thing with my site is that there is one page that gets a lot views because it shows up high on Google search. I’m sure hardly anyone goes to any of the other pages. The page with the high rank on Google only has text on it. ---
**Author:** ![Stathol](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/71e660/32.png) [@Stathol](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Stathol)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2009, 10:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cheapest-way-to-set-up-a-small-website/500314/12 "2009-06-19T22:22:16Z")
> [@arseNal](#): > > If your bandwidth requirements are really that low, why don’t you host the server yourself and just use one of those free dynamic DNS services (like [no-ip.org](http://no-ip.org)) to point to your home IP? This may work reasonably well for some (it’s what I do for my personal hosting needs), but there are a few things to bear in mind about this. 1. It may technically violate your ToS with your ISP. In fact, I’m pretty sure this is the case with my FIOS service at home, but I’m doing it anyway because I don’t care, and also, Verizon can bite me. 😛 2. Whether or not it violates ToS, there’s a good chance that they’ll block all incoming traffic to their network with TCP dest port 80 (and all outgoing traffic with src port=80). This is _definitely_ the case with FIOS, and with most other residential broadband providers. In the case of 2), you can still run a web server, of course, but you’ll have to run it on a non-standard port like 8080 instead. Most of the time this isn’t an issue – it merely means that instead of looking like this: [http://www.example.com/whatever.html](http://www.example.com/whatever.html) Your URIs will instead have to look something like: [http://www.example.com:8080/whatever.html](http://www.example.com:8080/whatever.html) Speaking from personal experience, I’ve seen a few cases where this causes problem. People behind restrictive firewalls may only have an ALLOW rule carved out for port 80, but leave 8080 in the default blocked states. 8080 is a fairly common alternative port for HTTP servers, though, so this doesn’t happen quite as often as you might think. Secondly, I’ve run into a few message boards that allow you to provide a URI to your avatar image that will shit a digital brick when they see the port specifier in the URI. Some versions of phpbb do this, for instance. This generally isn’t intentional; they just failed to anticipate the possibility of a port specifier being included in an http:// URI, even though this is part of the relevant RFC. ---
**Author:** ![Mangetout](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mangetout/32/19_2.png) [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2009, 11:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cheapest-way-to-set-up-a-small-website/500314/13 "2009-06-19T23:40:08Z")
> [@Troy\_McClure\_SF](#): > > I use Flickr to host images for my site, which I will shamelessly plug [here](http://goldengatebeerblog.wordpress.com/). Of course most of my image content is gonna be photos I’ve taken, and are already on my Flickr. Easy embedding/linking code, whose alt tag defaults to the photo title, plus it automatically resizes photos. Interesting… do they impose any restrictions on bandwidth, overall number of images (content type (e.g. non-photo images such as diagrams, banners), etc? ---
**Author:** ![Troy\_McClure\_SF](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/troy_mcclure_sf/32/4150_2.png) [@Troy\_McClure\_SF](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Troy_McClure_SF)\ **Post date:** [June 20, 2009, 12:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cheapest-way-to-set-up-a-small-website/500314/14 "2009-06-20T00:24:29Z")
> [@Mangetout](#): > > Interesting… do they impose any restrictions on bandwidth, overall number of images (content type (e.g. non-photo images such as diagrams, banners), etc? [Here](http://www.flickr.com/guidelines.gne) their guidelines. I don’t know of any bandwidth restrictions, especially considering how often a site like FARK or Digg link to them. The default code includes a link back to the photo page, and they tell you to use it, but I’ve seen plenty of examples of people just [hotlinking](http://www.uniwatchblog.com/) without any apparent problem. ---
**Author:** ![Khadaji](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/9e8a1a/32.png) [@Khadaji](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Khadaji)\ **Post date:** [June 20, 2009, 10:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cheapest-way-to-set-up-a-small-website/500314/15 "2009-06-20T10:52:49Z")
If you use GoDaddy, be careful in that everything is set up for automatic renewal. You can set it yourself for manual renewal, but the automatic renewal is opt-out, not opt-in. This annoys me because if you aren’t aware of this, you don’t know to set it off and the new bill will take you by surprise.