The first step towards getting your business or personal site running is getting your own space on the web, which starts with getting your own domain name. If you want your own personal domain you have to pay a yearly fee but it doesn't have to cost much, and there are even free alternatives that are almost as good.
A domain name or site name is a unique text URL that references your site and only your site. Google.com and How2buildyourwebsite.com are examples of domain names. The authority that domains must be registered with is the "Internet Corporation For Assigned Names And Numbers Authority"or the ICANN which is the agency that oversees the allocation of domains on the web.
A regular person cannot directly register a domain name with the ICANN because that would be to easy. To get your site online you need to go through a licensed domain registrar. These registrar sites charge a yearly rate which can run between five to twenty dollars per year.
Some licensed domain registers also offer web hosting. Web hosting services offer the online storage space you need for your files. Your domain doesn't need to be registered with the same company that provides your web hosting; in fact, web hosting companies usually gouge you on the price for the added convenience of using one company.
One of the cheapest domain registrars online is Namecheap who's prices average at about 8.88 per year which is less than three quarters a month. If your interested Namecheap also recently started offering web hosting as well but this is not their specialty. I have used Namecheap personally for over a dozen different domain names and have never had any problems with their customer service.
The real question is what can you get for free? Well depending on what your looking for it turns out you might be able to get everything you need for no cost at all. There are a number of sites online such as CO.CC that offer a free sub domain of their site. What this means is that your domain is actually a part of their domain and the URL will reflect that.
A sub domain does give the overall domain a little control over your domain name, you are dependent on their existence and continued service online. They do not force any advertisements on your site. They do somewhat limit the overall amount of bandwidth traffic, and disc space you can have. The most important sacrifice is that your domain name itself has to be a subset of theirs. In other words you cannot have mydomainname.com but rather if you register with the site CO.CC your site would have to be named mydomainname.co.cc but if replacing the typical.com or.net extension with the extension of .CO.CC doesn't bother you, then one of these free alternatives might be just what you need.
There is much more to learn about domain name registration [http://www.how2buildyourwebsite.com/pages/domain-registrar.htm], web hosting [http://www.how2buildyourwebsite.com/pages/web-host.htm], and just all aspects of web site creation, maintenance, and promotion check out How 2 Build Your Website for more tutorials and information.
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