If you have the effort to want to do so, you can buy a domain name about
$6 if you're getting a
.com, .org, .net,, and a few others extension names. Now you have the domain name for
365 days.
After you buy your domain name, ask your isp for a
dedicated ip address.. normally it's around $5 month added to your isp account bill. Now that you have your
dedicated isp address, all you would need to do on your end is setup a
server, which is easy to do, then you can have your web site, actually being
hosted on your hard drive, and the
whole world can see it.
Now that you've done that, you not only save on server fees and hosting company fees, you can expand as much as your computer has the space to do so.
If you don't have issues like, paying your electric, paying your isp bills, and maintaining your computer, you can save yourself a lot of money, and a lot of headaches too. It's not bad if you have a
remote hosting company, but it's even better when you can
host your own self. You do
everything....... and I mean everything.. yourself. Don't let that scare you, if you have a learning and wanting to learn ability, you'll setup a server in no time, and serve it to the whole world, and never pay any hosting costs ever again. That's money saved, and knowledge learned.
I don't even know what computer you have, but if you took the time to set it up (about an or or so, for new users to it), all software.... you can serve up your own site in a few days or so, coming from your hard drive.
If you want to go with something besides you doing it yourself, then you'll want a dedicated server. And you don't want a shared server, and (or) a
FREE one either, because either they'll add their own names to the address, and (or) they'll place banners and such on your site,.... and (or) they'll restrict you as to what you can install and run on the server.
And if you setup your own sever, you can have as many domains, sub-domains, or any other internet capabilities you want or need, like hosting people if you wanted to.... and much, much more.
In other words,,, when you have a remote server, you don't know if it's actually in a person's basement or what. There isn't a way to tell, not unless you personally went to the location of the hosting company. But again, there's nothing wrong with having a remote server (a hosting company).
And last but not least, if you go with any hosting company,
YOU ARE BEING WARNED RIGHT NOW, that you should, and better check the ip address they plan on giving you. And when you get that ip address, you need to do a check and make sure that ip address isn't on a
banned/blocked ip list. There are many sources to verify banned ip's, but the easiest way would be to use
PeerGuardian 2, then navigate to that ip address browser, and if it's on a banned ip list,
PeerGuardian 2 will show the warning. Currently mine is
blocking over 2.9 billion ip addresses from connecting to my computer, which would mean that if your site is hosted on a banned ip address, you'll never get any real traffic anyway to that site. So check out the ip address they give you. They know that most people don't look at it like I'm explaining it, and they'll pawn off those bad ip addresses on you in a minute.
And then..... you can save your monthly dedicated ip address charges by using
Tor:http://tor.eff.org/ All of this is definitely something worth looking into.