In this article, I would like to share a method little known to small business owners. The method is not a secret – it’s actually a feature made available by most free web hosting providers.
You might be one of the small business owners with these typical problems: You want to create a credible website for your business with a dot-com domain name, but you don’t want to spend thousands of dollar hiring web designer/developer; also, you don’t want all the hassle related to hosting your own website and work on website coding.
In fact, this simple method will only cost you your domain name purchase price (about $10 for a dot-com domain name) – if you decide to have your own domain name, which I strongly recommend. More on this later – read on.
Here are some tips on how to easily host your business website for free
1. Sign up with a free web hosting provider
To start-off your money-saving journey, you need to sign up with a free web hosting. There are plenty of popular choices, but I strongly recommend you to sign up with a free website hosting provider that offer Do-It-Yourself features to build your own site easily: uCoz.com, Webs.com, Google’s Blogger.com, WordPress.com, etc.
Signing up with any of the above is free. With your free account, you are entitled to all the features you need to build a business website (or a business blog, if you wish.) Those free site hosting comes with easy to use interface – even some, such as uCoz.com, offers you click-and-drag capabilities to create your website layout.
To access more advanced features, you might need to pay a certain amount of money, but I don’t think you should do this – for now.
2. Buy a domain name
Why you need a domain name? The answer is: Credibility. Let me ask you a question: Which one looks more credible than the other: www.Your-Biz-Website.com or Your-Biz-Website.uCoz.com? For me, the former is more credible than the latter.
Of course, the free web hosting you sign up will give you a “default” web address (usually a sub-domain,) usually by incorporating your user name on it. For example: YourUserName.Blogspot.com, YourUserName.WordPress.com and such.
3. Link your domain name to your free website hosting
You can “link” your domain name with your free website hosting account easily via your account administration panel.
Using uCoz.com as an example, you can do so by login to your Control Panel and go to Domain Attachment section; then you start “attaching” your domain name to the default sub-domain name. It’s that simple.
Why would I need to do the above?
Well, do you realise that you are now enabled to run your full-featured, fully-customised, professional-looking business website for free?
Web hosting: Free (a shared web hosting will cost you about $10/year.)
Website design: Free (hiring a freelancer or a web designer/developer would cost you hundreds if not thousands of dollar, excluding website maintenance fee.)
Your real cost is only your domain name price – only about $10 a year. So you are practically saving hundreds to thousands of dollars for your business website creation. ‘Talk about savings…
To dig deeper, you might want to Google for this or better yet, you can learn more on how to make your own website from uCoz.com and other free website hosting providers’ website – they are usually offering comprehensive guide, including FAQs, videos and more.
Ivan Widjaya
Building a credible business website for free
Image credit: uCoz.com