I managed to get my pluis.com.au website set up for the grand total of $25.98 – for two years!
| Domain Registration | $25.98 for two years | smartyhost |
|---|---|---|
| Web hosting | $free | 0lx.net |
| $free | Google Apps (just the email portion) |
Why so cheap?
Freebies. I stumbled across an article on IT Wire titled Use open source to build your own online presence for nothing [Part 1 | Part 2] written by David M. Williams. I decided to use the ideas mentioned in the article as my launching point.
Domain Registration
The domain registration was probably the easiest thing. Stock standard – I searched for domain I wanted (pluis.com.au). It’s available – yes. Thank you very much – here’s my credit card details. Yay – domain registered.
Web hosting
I followed Dave’s path and signed up for some free hosting at 0lx.net. 0lx.net provides a PHP/MySql backend. Up to five domains and five databases can be maintained for free.
Email
I used Google Apps to help out for the email side of things. I had to sign up for a Google Apps account, which was mostly painless. I told them I already owned my own domain. To prove that I owned it I had to FTP a small file up to the website for them to check it. They found it without a drama so the account was activated. I was not interested in Google docs, homepage, site, calendar or chat. I only wanted the email-handling capabilities.
This involved heading back to my web hosts control panel and changing the MX entry to ensure my email was to be handled by the Google mail servers. There was a ~24 hour period where I had to wait for the MX record change to propogate, but after that all I had to do was set up my email client (Mozilla Thunderbird 2) to access email from the Google mail servers.
So now I have a domain, web site, and associated email addresses for ~$13 a year.
