Did you know that for the price of a dozen lattes, you can set up your own website and .com name in a matter of minutes? Yup, for less than the price of a vanity plate for your car, you can carve a niche for yourself on the World Wide Web. Here’s how you can do it.

NOTE:  I use GoDaddy and FatCow but I do not work for either company, neither am I being reimbursed for anything I say here. GoDaddy is pretty good but I’m sure you can find similar or better hosts than FatCow. Above all, read reviews of these services before you sign up.

1. The cheapest domain registration that I have found is at GoDaddy.com. Depending on the type of domain you choose, you can get a full year or two of registration for less than $20.00, less than $12.00 for a year. Head over and see what kind of cool name you can think of for your site. Contrary to popular belief, not all the good names have been taken. Additionally, some names have expired and are abailable to be picked up again. Give it a shot. Remember, shorter is better. I like .com names simply because everyone remembers them. I had to use .ca for this one but most of mine are .com sites.

TIP: Just because you use GoDaddy for your domain registration, don’t feel that you have to use their hosting services…they’re expensive!

2. Since this is your first site, shared hosting is fine. No need to pay for things you don’t need (such as speed), so once you get your domain registered, head over to a hosting company such as FatCow. If you wonder why my site is sometimes slow to load, it’s because I use FatCow. However, you can host your site for less than $4.00 a month and you can sign up for two years, making the total less than $100.00 for that amount of time. If you don’t know what your future holds, book it for one year and have some fun. Should you decide not to use their hosting once your time is up, you can still keep the domain over at GoDaddy.

TIP: In my opinion, it’s better NOT to have your domain registration and hosting with the same company. If the hosting company goes belly up, you’re pretty safe with GoDaddy as a registration spot.

3. Once you set up your domain, use it to set up your hosting. FatCow seems to require a domain name to get an account. Once you get the hosting account, there is no limit to the number of domains you can host. That’s why they call it shared hosting, right? I have twelve sites on my one account so FatCow’s no-limit hosting is real. The downside to that is that the sites are often very slow to load. Once I get things going a bit more, I will switch to a faster (and more expensive) hosting company.

4. After you get the hosting, go back to GoDaddy and set the nameservers to route traffic over to your site. The details of all of this are a bit much for this first post on creating a new site so I’ll end this here. Trust me, it’s not complicated, it’s not technical and much of it, believe it or not, makes perfect sense. If you can use Word or Excel or configure your router, you’re up to creating your own website.

That’s it! For about $50.00 a year, you’ve got your own site. ($12.00 for the domain for a year and about $38.00 for the hosting per year) Think of it! Your very own soapbox for almost nothing. Yay!

TIP: Almost all of my sites use WordPress. You don’t have to know anything about coding html or css to use WordPress and your blog posts are entered in your browser, easy as pie, not complicated at all. Installing WordPress isn’t difficult and there is a five-minute installation routine that will hold your hand the whole way through. As these posts proceed, I will write about installing WordPress myself.

Thanks for reading! Questions and comments are welcome.