🗒️ I won’t be mentioning site builders here because I want you to actually code your own site. Trust me, it’s more fun than making yourself a carrd.

I’ve seen countless times that people wants to create a website, but can’t because they don’t have money to go host that site.

I’m gonna say it: you don’t need to pay for hosting! Sure, it’s much better using a paid service but it doesn’t mean that you need to get such paid hosted service to create a site.

Like this site, this site is hosted on Nekoweb, a free static site hosting platform (see that I mentioned static, we’ll discuss it later), and it works just as well on hosted platforms.

What you might be thinking of “making a site” means

So, if you want to make a website, you might be asking yourself these questions:

• Where should I host it?
• What domain should I get?
• What content should I put on my site?
• What theme should my site be?
• What site should I take code from? (I’m gonna talk about this eventually)

and you start to make your site, doing what you want, but suddenly, you want to host it, so you’re scouring Google for the best web hosts and domains that you’ll get.

But disaster strikes, you don’t have money to buy all of that stuff! And you just stopped making your site because you can’t pay for it.

It does not need to be like that, you can make a site, then host it for basically for free.

Hosting a website for basically free

There’s a couple of services you can use to host your site on for free:

• Static site hosting platforms like Nekoweb or Neocities,
• Static site services like GitHub Pages, Codeberg Pages or GitLab Pages,
• Dynamic site hosting platforms like Vercel or Netlify,
• Or even free tiers of cloud services like Oracle Cloud Free Tier

And for the URL, you can just use the provided subdomains given by you by each of the hosts above or you can get free subdomains from afraid.org, deSEC, Open Domains or specific free subdomains like is-a.dev.

There is also cheap TLDs and hosting services but that’s not the scope of this post so I won’t be mentioning all of them (but if you want to, people seems to like Dreamhost for site hosting, and Porkbun for domains).

🗒️ Domains and subdomains are different. Subdomains are [your-name].[service-name].[tld] like jbcarreon123.nekoweb.org (nekoweb.org is the domain) or jb.is-a.dev (is-a.dev is the domain).

Static vs Dynamic sites

Have you seen I mentioned “static”? That’s because there are 2 kinds of websites, Static and Dynamic.

Static sites are just that, static. It does not need to fetch something in the backend for necessary stuff, and it does not need to be personalized to a person lurking into a website.

Dynamic sites in the other hand, are personalized to each user and typically has more functionality on them, for example, maps, social media apps and other kinds of stuff.

Having JavaScript to a website doesn’t mean it’s dynamic. Most static sites also use JS for interactivity and stuff, and some static sites won’t work without client-side Javascript. Yes, that includes that stupid flood script I mentioned in my previous post.

Also, having JS doesn’t mean it’s static also. Most web platforms nowadays just don’t work without client-side JS because dynamic sites use both backend and client-side JS.

For your personal site, you don’t need to make your site dynamic. You’re not making the next Discord, or the next Twitter or the next Spotify. You’re making your personal site.

...but jb, I don’t have knowledge of making a website!

That’s another thing that most people ask about.

You don’t need to pay for a Udemy course so you can code your website, you can learn stuff by going to sites like MDN or W3Schools, scouring through your search engine and finding stuff, or even asking AI for help (I know that some of you hates AI but if you just ask AI for help, not making it generate your entire website code, AI is a wonderful tool for that.)

Focus first on what you want, don’t focus on accessibility or site responsiveness yet while you haven’t made a website, and believe in yourself!

I learned how to code by looking at other’s work (not stealing!) and making my own unique things with that knowledge, and now I am now capable of coding things!

Opinions from mysterious forces

So I asked some mysterious forces of what their opinion about this, and this is what I got:

from Mechagic:

Hosting your website online doesn't require money, because newsflash: free webhosts exist, and they're all pretty swagger with what you can and cant do on them. You can do a lot with just a static website.

from Memecompanies (moosyu):

time is money if i spent all the time i spent working on my site working at mc donalds id be a billionaire right now

And that’s about it!

Got inspired by this post and you made a site? Share it on my guestbook!