You are here to learn to host you domain name for free. Before starting get familiar with web servers and why it is needed to create a website. You may be thinking “Why I need this even I already have a domain name?”. Here is your answer. To make sure when you open a domain it shows a website, the required files and data must be stored in a computer which is always online. These are large computers and are called servers. Web servers consists of powerful computers and huge storage. Whenever we open a website the files and data stored in those web servers get displayed in our browser. The domain name provider only links your fancy domain name to web servers. I think it is clear to you about web servers.
You can develop you own web server but as I said earlier, your computer must me connected to high speed internet connection to serve your visitor a website. And definitely it will be more expensive than using a free web server that provides many good feature including security for free.
So let’s host a domain name for free. There are many web hosting providers available that also provides hosting for free. And there are different types of web hosting too. Today I am going to use ByetHost.
Signup for free hosting
Go to https://byet.host and signup for free hosting.
Fill the details. ByetHost also provides a free subdomain as yoursubdomain.byethost#.com (where # is a number). This means, you can create a website using this subdomain if you don’t have a domain name. Since creating subdomain is necessary put any subdomain name that you want. We will setup main domain later. Other hosting providers gives option to set your domain instead of subdomain here. The password you set here is password for CPanel, FTP and MySQL so don’t lost it. You may get confirmation email. Confirm your registration. If you didn’t find confirmation email check in junk folder.
After complete registration ByetHost will send you account information and link to your CPanel. You will need username to login to CPanel and the password is same as you set before.
Setup web server with domain name
Open your CPanel. Or you can go to https://cpanel.byethost.com to CPanel login screen. Enter your username and password and login.
You will get you CPanel after login. Now we need to setup your domain name you already have. For example let’s suppose you have gamehub.com domain name you want to host. Scroll down to DOMAINS and select Addon Domains.
In New Domain Name enter your domain name you want to host. In this example it is gamehub.com. We told the hosting provider to host gamehub.com but domain name provider does not know that. So login to your domain name provider and set the name servers as given. If you domain name uses only 2 name servers, put ns1.byet.org and ns2.byet.org as primary and secondary name servers. In fact we did’t need all name servers, it is only for backup, if one goes down then next will handle the work.
Successfully we have done all the work to host the domain name for free. Although you have hosted your domain, it can’t be visited because you have not uploaded any web pages to your server. Creating website is very simple nowadays since there are many platforms to create websites. Some are WordPress, Joomla, Ghost, bbPress (forum site) etc. Among them WordPress is more popular to create blog sites. You can install WordPress from Softaculous Apps Installer.
ByetHost gives free web hosting which is great for startup users but it does not allow adsense or monetization in your website. There may be other free hosting providers also that fits you and your website.
Comment below if you get in trouble.
Excellent article! As a hosting provider we can offer not only free sub-domains but also full featured low cost hosting plans. It would be interesting to see your take on free sub-domain hosting vs. low cost full featured hosting.
Many thanks for dropping the comment.