Update: JustFree.com seems to be not accepting new registrations at the moment…use this tutorial as a guide to the concepts, but register instead with Free Web Host Now! instead of JustFree.com. The screenshots will not match, but you should be able to figure out what’s different until I can write new tutorials. The one extra step you must do once you’re into your control panel is create a subdomain for your blog.
While not every way of making money online requires you to have your own website, most of them either do, or your chances are improved by having your own website. So let’s talk about how to set one up. My focus here will be on setting up a website for free but giving you the tools you need to customize it. I’ll avoid the free blog hosts, because most of those don’t give you the customization options you’ll eventually want.
The first step is to sign up at a web host. Most web hosts charge for this service, and if you’re serious about running a website that can handle large amounts of traffic, you’d be better off paying for web hosting. But since our focus is on free, go to JustFree.com.
Once you’re there, click Register (circled in the image above). That’ll get you to where you can put in your information:
You’ll need a valid email address. If you don’t want to use your main email address for this type of thing, I suggest you get a free Google Mail address at gmail.com. This allows you to separate your normal email from your website emails. Under “How did you find us?”, choose Other and put in “Online Opportunity” (no, I don’t get anything for this).
Also, keep in mind that your webpage address will be username.justfree.com, so pick a username that you don’t mind being in your web address. Something that matches the purpose of your website would be good, and if you’ve done keyword research ahead of time use a good keyword as your username.
After you register with JustFree.com, you’ll get a confirmation email. Click on the link in that email, and you’ll get to this screen:
Of course, your email and user name will be different. You can safely ignore phone if you’re not comfortable giving it out. Extra domain means that you could have a web address different from username.justfree.com, but registering a domain costs money. Since the focus of this post is free, we’ll ignore using a domain name.
Once you submit this information, you now have a website. Go to username.justfree.com, replacing username with your user name, and you’ll see the placeholder site that JustFree.com puts in for you. Notice that they’ve put some Adsense ads on the placeholder site. You don’t get the money for those ads, so we’ll want to put up a real web page.
In Part 2, we’ll look at how to setup a blog very much like this one.
If you already know that you want to have a webhost that will support larger amounts of traffic than JustFree.com and are willing to pay for it, I can recommend both Site5 and Midphase. I’ve had hosting accounts with each, and have been impressed with their level of customer service and have had few technical problems with the web sites. This blog, for example, is hosted at Site5. You can sign up for either using the links below. I think Site5 provides the best value, at more space and bandwidth than you’d really need for only $5 a month, but you won’t go wrong with Midphase, either.
I wonder if this really come in handy, i’ll check it out later on.
thanks Jay for this. going to try your advices
What’s up with Just Free?
I can’t setup an account.
Any insight?
Hi Jim, I just tried to setup a test account, and everything looked like it worked fine but I haven’t received the verification email yet, so my account isn’t active. I’m not sure what’s going on, but will try to find out.
For anyone else who is having trouble with JustFree.com, I’ve opened a reseller account and am offering free web hosting at Free Web Host Now!. The package I’m using seems to be superior to JustFree.com’s offerings.
I’ll eventually write a new set of tutorials on getting WordPress installed with the new free host, but it shouldn’t be any more difficult than with JustFree.com. The only extra step needed is to create a subdomain before installing WordPress.
I want to make my own website
Hi Khadijah, depending on why you want to make a website, the tools you use can be very different. If you use the contact form to give me more details, I can steer you in the right direction.
Hi Jay,I was wondering if you could please spare me some of your time to help me out with some issues regarding websites..I’m a newbie and after reading your post,i think your a nice & helpful kinda person.That’s why i decided to ask you for some guidance.Your reply will be much appreciated…Thank you for the info on this post and theother posts also.
Hi Valerie, I’ll be glad to help if I can. You can use the contact form from the top menu to send me the details of your questions, and I’ll see if I can help.
Hi, Jay,
This is a great resource for people, particularly for those starting out – not just this post, but your entire blog. I’ve added you to my blogroll with the description ‘Help For New Starters’. Thanks for all your reviews and advice!
Thanks, Martin! I appreciate the link.
nice article – easy to follow steps! thanks!
Came here from a link on justfree.com FAQs. There does not seem to be an issue now with new registrations. The News page there does document some issues with email confirmations with certain accounts like yahoo.com.
Thanks for the tips and I’ll explore more…
Hi David, thanks for the update. I’m glad to hear that JustFree.com is alive and well!
Nice article. I can’t believe I haven’t heard of this before now! Keep well, Tony
The entire blog is very useful. Your help is needed – know that!
I have a website and have signed up to have it hosted and my domain name hosted by Just Free. I can’t figure out how to get my website up though – can you help?
[quote comment=””]I have a website and have signed up to have it hosted and my domain name hosted by Just Free. I can’t figure out how to get my website up though – can you help?[/quote]
FTP is the fastest way if you know how to use it, but using the file manager from within your JustFree control panel will work, too.
how come they stopped taking new registration? Anyone have any invite left? or can forward me to a similar service?
[quote comment=””]how come they stopped taking new registration? Anyone have any invite left? or can forward me to a similar service?[/quote]
I haven’t tried them, but 110mb.com looks nice. You don’t get MySQL out of the box, but a $10 one time payment will turn on MySQL databases for your account. No monthly fees, it’s an interesting approach to web hosting.
If this service is down you can always setup a quick and free website over at blogger.com…and when you’re ready to buy hosting and host the blog (website) yourself, it’s not so hard to move content from that platform over to your own hosted wordpress blog install on yourdomain.com 🙂
Hope this helps,
Sean