The process took an hour or so. I was surprised it worked; I gave up on using godaddy.com a long time ago because their system seemed quite complex for the website I wanted to create.
I found freehostia.com which offers a free web hosting account. It truly is free. My website is working.
But...
It requires a domain name be registered, or an existing domain name typed in which will be forwarded. I didn't know what to do but I was sure there were cheaper ways to get a domain name. Freehostia is cheap, around $10 for a .com or other domain suffixes, but I wanted something cheaper!
To go along with Freehostia's web site hosting, I went straight to whois.com where I've registered domains before. I chose a domain name which was going to be suitable but discardable in future. I simply don't know what I want to call my "business" and I don't know exactly what type of service it will be, so I chose patiostudioproductions, which is very indicative of how I spend my days.
The suffix .biz was on sale, so I purchased patiostudioproductions.biz for $5 or so, and paid using paypal. I won five bucks a long time ago, and apparently it was still sitting in my paypal account.
I put in a partial name and address, so my real info wouldn't be visible whenever some joker looks up who owns the domain. I didn't want to have to pay extra for privacy. To have my name and address hidden, the cost per year is double what I paid for the domain! I don't approve of that practice.
There was a bit of setup required. You have to log into the whois.com (or wherever you bought the domain) domain centre and change some DNS settings to match the website host. You log into the domain centre on the website host as well...
To make a long story short, I just opened a desperate help chat window at the whois.com website and they typed enough instructions that made the whole problem disappear.
It worked. Like, right away! Within minutes I could type my new website address into Safari and it appeared! I had created a simple home.html file that said "Welcome" and so on, and it actually showed up all of a sudden. Those DNS settings are important. I'm glad the process worked; it seems my cutting and pasting of settings moved the right details into the right text boxes.
So there you go, I have a domain name and web host to practice and show off my HTML5 and CSS skills I learned earlier this summer. Who knows, maybe I'll become a producer of some...productions...! They will be artistic no doubt, and likely involving web design and video too.
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