I started a website when I was 16, but YouTube took over, and it wasn’t worth paying.
I’m just looking for a completely free place to create a website. I don’t have a dollar to spend, and creating this cheap website to make money, even just a few bucks.
If there’s a site you know of, that doesn’t require credit/debit cards, I would really appreciate it. If there are many, I guess I’d pick the place that allows a decent URL
But, I suspect that as soon as you start to do anything remotely commercial with your site, it will no longer be free. Also, there are many limitations to the free hosting service.
To be clear, you’re looking for a free website, that you can use to make money? I don’t think that exists. If you’re making money off of it, then the hosting company is going to want their slice.
I thought I could always put my e-mail, so I can negotiate afterwards… I’m a musician looking for work, and I have collectibles. Basically text-only, but I do have paypal and used to create buttons about 25 yrs ago.
It probably doesn’t make financial sense to do this. Better to use an e-commerce site (like, say, Etsy) that takes a cut, then to make your own site that nobody is ever going to find.
I use Weebly to host my (strictly amateur) photography website. Note: by using them, the URL of your website will be in the form “x.weebly.com.”
Doesn’t wix.com work the same way?
So a website has two parts. Hosting, which means a computer that hosts and serves the files for the website, and a domain, which is what you type in the browser to get there.
As a teenager a decade ago I could get free domains from the .tk registrar, which is the domain name registrar for the Tokelou Islands in Oceana (a territory of New Zealand near American Samoa, pop. ~1500). Apparently you still can get a domain from them, for free. The deal is, you can’t have hate speech, drugs, sex, etc, and you have to manually go in and renew every year I think.
I also used Heliohost, which as I recall is a nonprofit collective of people who run small, simple websites. The deal is that you have to log in every thirty days or they delete your files, and they meter CPU usage and storage space, but otherwise it’s free. (When you do have some change they expect you to donate a little to the cause.)
~Max
The above should work for a small commercial enterprise too.
I should note, if you have a stable computer and internet connection you can host your website from your home computer. You can use node.js or something. If you go for a home server keep in mind there are drawbacks: the website goes down whenever your internet goes down, if a lot of people visit your website your home internet will slow down accordingly, and your home network gets exposed to the threat of cyber attacks since you’re listing your home IP address in the (public) domain name system.
~Max
Hosting yourself is generally a terrible option. Your site will be slow, it might be disallowed under your ISP agreement, your public IP will change, and you need to be somewhat technically savvy. Also, everything Max_S said.
I did it for a while for a hobby site, because I’m into that sort of thing. It was objectively a bad option.
Exposing your email address on a web page that is directly visible to the public is pretty much a recipe for that mailbox becoming unusable in fairly short order, due to a deluge of spam, scams and malware.
I wonder if you might be better off advertising your services on marketplaces that already exist for the purpose - Fiverr for the music, Etsy or something for the collectibles. It’s hard to attain success on either of those, but that’s a function of the volume of competition, not any specific flaw of the platforms.
If you’re fine with selling your soul to the [devil] google sites will work very well, and it opens up their whole google ecosystem, including ways to monetize
GitHub Pages, is available with a free tier if you’re comfortable with Git.
Thank you all for contributing… I’ll look into them and hopefully do something.
Note that this may violate the terms of service of your internet provider. Some of them don’t allow you to set up a “server” of any sort unless you pay for a higher tier service.
Residential internet service also typically does not include a static IP, though there are ways to handle the fact that your IP might change at any time.