How to buy and run a website for less than a £1 per year

March 30, 2008 – 7:49 pm

If I said that I could run a website for 2 years for less than £2 would you believe me? I used to think that I was getting a good deal on my web hosting which costs around £20 per year, until someone on the forum kindly pointed me in the direction of some completely free (ad free) web hosting.

I now have around 4 sites running off this free web hosting and can safely say that it is great value! Then last week I discovered that the domain registration company that I have been buying domain names off are running a £5 discount code promotion at the moment as well. If you use the discount code – TD20080331 at the checkout of UK2.net.

So that means I can buy a .co.uk or .org.uk domain for £2 for less than 2 years and can host it on free web hosting as well.

If you don’t know anything about buying domain names and hosting them somewhere else, then the one thing to keep in mind is that you will need to change the DNS settings. (wikiepdia can explain DNS better than I can).

Essentially when you buy your domain name from UK2.net and you visit the login page (shown below for my holidays in paphos website). The DNS settings will not be pointing to any server since ou have just bought the domain. What you need to do is change your DNS settings so they point to the free web hositng. This is easy just click on the ‘DNS management’ tab which you can see in the image below.

Then change the DNS settings so they point to the free web hosting, which you can see below. This means that in the window you see in the image below click on ‘change nameservers’ and change the primary and secondary name servers to dns1.000webhost.com and dns2.000webhost.com respectively.

Then wait till the changes have taken effect and you you will be able to access your domain using an FTP programme and upload onto your free web hosting.