A personal website is a place for us to call home. It allows us to host our work, share our thoughts, and let people know who we are. Setting up a website can seem complicated and daunting, but it doesn’t have to be. Because at the end of the day, all we want to do is write. We don’t want to become part-time tech people trying to fix or maintain a website.
What Is a Website?
Before we dive into this post, let’s talk about websites. What exactly is a website? If you go to a website (even this one) and right click your mouse and click “View Source”, you’ll see exactly what a website is. It is a bunch of code we call HTML. This code has to reside somewhere and we call that a server. We’ll discuss this more a bit later but this is one of things you need.
Domain Name
The second thing you need is a domain name. Your domain name is the URL visitors will go to. It can be your first name and last name combined, or something else entirely. To obtain your domain name, you need to purchase it. The standard fee is around $10 a year, but highly sought after domains can be more expensive. There are also different fees for different domains. Typically, .com is the most common but there is also .ca, .me, .site, etc.
There are many places online to get a domain but you should be careful of where you buy your domain. Not all sellers are equal. Sometimes these sellers make it very difficult for you to move your domain from one server to another. If one server (the place where you are hosting your website) decides to raise their prices, you may want to move to another server and take your domain name with you. It’s for this reason that I recommend Name Cheap (https://www.namecheap.com/). They have good prices and easy tools for you to connect your domain to almost any server.
Server Space
After you have your domain name, you need to have server space. Remember, your website needs to live somewhere. Domain space can be free, cheap, or expensive! Something like Wix gives your website a home but at a cost (https://www.wix.com/upgrade/website). You don’t want ads on your site, so you’ll have to pay a higher monthly fee. But why pay this when you don’t have to?
For most people, all they need is a static site. That is, a site that isn’t changing dynamically. A dynamic site is tied to a content management system or a database. But you don’t need a fancy database or any special technology for your personal website. There are many services that will allow us to host our static website for free! Here are a few: GitHub Pages, Netlify, Cloudflare Page, Stackbit.
And the best part, these services (besides having no monthly fee) is they offer free HTTPS. Some other websites will charge you a fee to make your website secure. There’s no need to pay that fee when other places will do it for free.
WordPress
But what about WordPress? Isn’t that what everyone is using? Short answer, yes. A lot of people use WordPress and it is great if you are blogging. Should you blog? That’s up to you. But I would only recommend it if you are actually going to keep it up to date. Going to a person’s website and seeing their last blog post from over a year ago gives the impression they are no longer active.
Name Cheap offers a wordpress hosting option. It will cost you a few dollars a month. This is because you need additional things on your server. WordPress uses a database, they need to get PHP installed, etc. But there is a big issue with WordPress that doesn’t get talked about enough; security.
The biggest threat to your WordPress site is keeping WordPress and your plugins up to date. If you don’t, there is a chance your website will have a security breach. Updating the site and plugins isn’t difficult, but it is something you should be doing on a monthly basis. If you are hosting a blog, WordPress might be the easiest option for a fee. However, there are alternatives that are cheaper and require less maintenance.
The Bear Necessities
So, what exactly do you need? In the end, all most people need is a static website which means you only need HTML (and maybe some CSS to make it look pretty). Nothing fancy. But even then, we don’t want to spend our free time writing code or learning how to do that. Again, lucky for us, there are services that do this for free (or cheap)! Something like Google Sites, Carrd (there is a small yearly fee), Stackbit, or Netlify. Or you could find your own HTML template online and host that on GitHub Pages for free. There are plenty of sites that offer free HTML templates. There are also plenty that charge quite a bit of money so be careful.
But what about the server space you need? If you are hosting a static site, the websites I listed above (minus Carrd) will host your content for free.
For example, you can install Publii on your computer to create your website. You can do so from scratch, import your existing WordPress site, or use one of their many templates available. From there, you can send the HTML code that Publii creates to GitHub Pages or Netlify. These two services will host your code for free and provide you with a secure site (HTTPS). You can then use Name Cheap to link to your server and then that’s it!
Or if you want to make it even easier, you can create your basic site using Google Sites and link Name Cheap with that.
In the end, the main takeaway from this should be that you should not be paying crazy monthly fees to host your content. Spend more time writing and spend less money on your website!
Here are some links to help you:
Dr. Mike Biocchi completed his PhD and has received his Masters of Science as well as his Bachelor of Computer Science.