[frugalwench]

Hi everyone! My first post! I'm building my website very frugally, using a paid domain name (from GoDaddy), but free webhosting.

I paid for my domain name, because I found out that if you get a free domain name, it's very hard to transfer it to a paid domain if you choose to. Almost all of them will make you buy the name from them to transfer it, and depending on how well known your name has become, it may be quite costly.

I'm using free webspace from Google Pages and Freewebs. I mostly use Google Pages, but I'm building my backup site on Freewebs, and may be using them more.

Downside is that the bandwidth usage isn't high, and if you're going to be getting a lot of traffic, it's better to pay for a hosting space. Also, the sites go down for no reason whatsoever, and they'll even delete your webpages for no reason, so my best advice is BACKUP! BACKUP! BACKUP! I'm working on having a backup site with all my webpages on it just in case. That way, I can just redirect my domain and subdomains to that site, instead of having to build the whole site over again. It's not very time consuming to upload the same page to two, or even three, sites when you make it, and it's worth it to avoid downtime.

To avoid the bandwidth problem, you can spread your pages out over several free sites, and change the location of your main page from time to time by loading it to several sites, and redirecting from your domain. That way, no one site takes up too much bandwidth. I'm going to try to change my location about every week or so, depending on traffic. If I start getting a lot of traffic, I may need to do it more often.

Also, as to building your site, there is a great free sitebuilder called Kompozer that is owned by Google, and is a remake of the old Netscape Composer. It's really simple to use, and if you know a little html, even more functional. If you know css, it's even better! I know very little HTML and even less CSS, but I was able to create a template page easily, and just change the variable content.