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Where To Find Free Web Site Hosting & Domain Name Registration

Do you want to make money online?

Yes it’s a simple question and you probably have heard it a thousand times before, everyone talks about setting up a website or blog and start making truckloads of money really easy, “just purchase a domain name and a hosting plan and your all set…”, WRONG!, did you know that everyday theres 250,000 newly created blogs and only 3% of them continue to be active after a year?. Doesn’t sound so easy now, huh? and your probably asking yourself, “what if I invest the money in purchasing a domain and hosting but it doesn’t work out?”, that’s where I come in, I’ll teach you how to set a whole website up for the affordable price of $0, so if it works out you’ll have a new income, but if it doesn’t, you haven’t lost a single penny.

Many people don’t know this but I started my cyber empire without investing anything at all…I have made around 40+ websites since I started and all of them have payed for themselves and eventually gave me an extra income, I have never paid for a single thing online, learned how to design my sites so I wouldn’t have to pay designers, created my own advertising programs, payed my domains and hosting with ads and now I run quite an expensive dedicated server.I started back when there was no free hosts, hosting/domain prize contests or even contextual advertisement programs, now days you have it a lot easier.So how do you get started?

Free Web Hosting

When it comes to hosting you first have to decide what is it you want to host, if it’s a blog for example you could take the easy option and select one of the following free ones:

• WordPress.com
• Blogger.com
• LiveJournal.com

Those are your three major (based on features, popularity and options) choices, they lack control, customizing options and some even disallow using ads on your blog…there is advantages to using a free blog host but very few and most of them are about saving money which in our case is not a problem because we know how to do it for free :), so if your serious about becoming a webmaster and making money with your blog/website/forum…you need to find a serious free host with no ads of their own that offers a decent amount of space (to host your files) and bandwidth (to transfer your files to the visitors) as well as a PHP enabled server (to read/execute the files), FTP facility (to upload the files) and a mSQL database (to store the settings of your files).There’s much more to those fancy webmaster words than that but I have given you an idea of what they are used for, over the years I’ve found a few good free web hosts that reliably offer those features, here they are (I’ll keep this up to date and add others in the future):

• 000WebHost – They offer 1,500 Megabytes space, 100,000 Megabytes bandwidth, mSQL database, FTP, PHP, daily backups of your content and a control panel with one click installations for WordPress, phpBB forums + 40 other content managers so you don’t need to install them yourself.
• 110 MB – 97% server up time (less than 000webhost), they offer 5,000 megabytes space, 300,000 megabytes bandwidth, PHP, FTP, mSQL and 30 one click install content managers like WordPress and phpBB.
• 50 Webs – This one isn’t for bloggers or forums but its great for simple websites, 60 megabytes space, unlimited bandwidth, FTP, 100% up time and a control panel.

Free Web Domains

Now that you have the hosting, the next step is to find a proper domain name that will represent your website, surely you don’t want to stay with the free subdomain your host offers…something crappy like yourname.hostname.com :S.Personally I find the name of your site to be extremely important, sure content is the most important thing but if you have a good name it helps not only your visitors by giving a good first impression but search engines scan for keywords in your domain (eg: MatthewsBookReviews.com) or you can make something brandable like I did with Triponic.com.When it comes to free domains you have two options, let me go into them below:

Free Domain

These are domain names (not really domain names, they basically just redirect to your site but maintain the new domain url) that are free of charge but come with limited options and less features than the pay .com ones (like some dont have dns server control…which in not necessary unless you have a pay host, less search engine indexing…though this can be tweaked to work better and sometimes they require you to add a banner or button on your site).I started off with one of these and even though I had made enough money to purchase proper domains I kept them for a long time, if you know how to market them they become quite handy as you can register as many domains as you want for free, these are my top picks:

• CO.CC: This was my first choice when I started, it offered the best features out of all the free domains and still does to this day, your domain will look like ‘www.yourname.co.cc’, they don’t have any advertisements at all! and offer supports for CNAME, A, MX and DNS (it’s the only one that offers dns options which is what the proper domains use, will come in handy once you become big and buy your own hosting).
• CO.NR: A fairly new comer to the free domain scene, your domain will look like ‘www.yourname.co.nr’, they offer quite a descent amount of features for their quality domains, they have Meta Tags options as well as FavIcon and you can pay some extra money to upgrade your free domain to a pay .co.nr which will allow you to control your DNS records (that co.cc already does for free).The only catch with the free domain they offer is that even though they say they don’t have ads or popups, they strongly advise you put up a button image advertising their services on your site.
• .TK: The .Tk’s domains have been around for as long as I can remember, they started off quite badly as most of their customers were porn, warez webmasters forcing them to add advertisements on all their free domains, now days they have cleaned up their image and now allow you to use the free domains with no ads at all, even implementing optional services like affiliate programs with other similar content .tk users.It’s advantages are obvious…it’s shorter than the others but also still has some of the bad image it use to plus doesn’t seem to rank as well in search engines like the ones above, they offer a pay upgrade similar to co.nr where you can purchase your .tk domain and have the domain options pay ones like .com’s have.

Win A Domain

If you seriously want a .com/net/org domain, you might want to consider winning a domain from one of many contests out there that give them out for free in exchange for a few hours of your time…all you have to do is complete a bunch of product offers they will give you and once you reached the required points level, you may claim your prize and earnyour domain.Theres dozens of these contests out there but not all are to be trusted, many never give you the prize you claim even though you’ve earned the required points :|, thats why I’m going to list a couple that have worked for me in the past and always pay up on time:

• EzyRewards: This one is fairly simple, you need to build up at least 1200 points by completing offers or getting your friends to sign up, the highest offers give you about 60-80 points per completion so complete some 15 offers and you’ll have your very own domain name :), they also have other prizes like iPods or Play Station Portables.
• AnotherFree: Works pretty similar to EzyRewards, their offers pay a bit less or require you to use your credit card for verification but you only need to get 8 points and can avoid using your credit card by completing some of the small 0.60 point offers.If you manage to get more points they offer quite a good hosting prize plan you may also claim.

So what are you waiting for? you now have all the necessary tools to start a proper professional website and start making some money…go go go!

Also Read:

• Choosing the right free firewall
• Best Of: Best Free Firewall
• The Relaunch
• Azureus
• Triponic Revamp

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