 Thrifty Rocker: Get Thee To The Web
While it seems like everyone and their cat has their own webpage, I'm sure there is a healthy minority of technophobes out there who assume it is either too difficult or too expensive. Turns out for about $9 a year you can get everything you need, and it's relatively easy to set everything up.
Registration
Every domain name (such as fakejazz.com or crappyrecords.com) must be registered. Back during the internet boom, there was only one place to register your domain name, Network Solutions, and they charged $35 a year. Thanks to our beloved US government, there are now literally thousands of places you can register a domain name at, some for as low as $5 a year.
Since there are so many options of where to register now, it may seem like a difficult choice. However, there is an internet watchdog organization, the ICANN, which "accredits" certain registrars. While in most cases an unaccredited registrar is just as good as an accredited one, the price difference is negligible. The cheapest accredited registrar is GoDaddy (www.godaddy.com), which charges the very competitive price of $8.95 per year. Aside from being the cheapest, however, GoDaddy also has a clean, easy-to-use interface and offers a few very useful set of extra features, the most important of which is domain forwarding. What "domain forwarding" means is if you register the domain crappyrecords.com, for free you can have GoDaddy forward all requests for www.crappyrecords.com to any other webpage on the internet.
Hosting
Now that you have a domain name and the ability to forward requests for that domain to any webpage, it's time to get a free webpage. The easiest way is to piggy-back on a friend's site. Find someone who likes you and ask them to give you a little space on their site. If nobody likes you, lots of places offer free webpage hosting. way back when the first webpage was created, it was likely a public offer to host other people's webpages. The problem is that most of these free webpage hosts insert banner or popup ads into your site. They've gotta make money somehow, whether it's directly from you or indirectly through ads.
There is hope, however. Several sites offer free small-scale packages in hopes that once you get started, you'll give in and buy their medium- and large-scale packages. The best and longest-standing of these is Brinkster (www.brinkster.com), which provides you with 30 megabytes of storage space and 500 megabytes of monthly bandwidth. Essentially, bandwidth is the amount of bytes your visitors can download from your site, and 500 megabytes is plenty for a small band or label (enough for thousands of visitors a month). Brinkster has been around just as long as Geocities and Tripod (de facto free webpage leaders), and that entire time they've never inserted ads anywhere.
Putting It All Together
If you decide to use Brinkster and GoDaddy, then you have all you really need for just $8.95 a year. After you setup your Brinkster account, they will give you a web address for your homepage. Simply tell GoDaddy to forward your domain to that web address, and whenever someone types your domain name in a web browser, they go to your Brinkster webpage.
There are a few extras you can add to make you look more professional. At this point, you have a domain name like www.crappyrecords.com that forwards to an arcane web address like www11.brinkster.com/crappyrecords/, and you have an email address like crapper@yahoo.com or dsmith@university.edu that likely has nothing to do with your domain name. If you don't want people to know you are such a thrifty rocker, for an extra few bucks you can sweep these things under the rug.
GoDaddy charges an extra $5.95 a year in order to mask you web address. Without this service, immediately after the reader enters www.crappyrecords.com, the web address they see is changed to www11.brinkster.com/crappyrecords/. With this service, when someone types in www.crappyrecords.com, the only web address they will see for your site is www.crappyrecords.com. The actual web address as you switch from page to page is hidden from the user.
GoDaddy charges an extra $0.99 a year in order to forward email from your domain to your everyday address. So you can set up an email address like captain@crappyrecords.com and list that on your website as your address. Whenever an email is sent to that address, you receive it in your normal inbox with the rest of your email.
 Making Pages
Now that you have a place to put pages, how do you make a HTML page? Well, the web is actually a great resource for how to make webpages. Just search for "HTML," and you will find a lot of documents. The best for beginners is NCSA's "A Beginner's Guide to HTML". HTML files are just normal text files with tags inside them that change the appearance of text and create links. You won't know how easy it is to make your own crappy, lame pages until you actually make your first crappy, lame page.
Another necessity to webpage creation is the ability to make and alter images. You've got cover art or band photos that you need to get online, so how do you do it? Most images on the web are moderate quality and resolution, and for good reason—you want pages to load quickly. Because most images you will create are not high quality, there is no need to overspend on equipment. In fact, several of the cover art images on this site were made using the cheapest digital camera. Pretty much any scanner or digital camera will do.
Once you have your images in your computer, you need some software for cropping them and resizing them. You could spend $600 on Photoshop. Or you could download the GIMP, a free image editing tool that is used by millions of Linux and Unix users and is also available for Windows. Gimp doesn't do everything that Photoshop does, but it does everything you need it to do that Photoshop does.
Multimedia
Of course, no music website is complete without a few MP3 files, and with the bandwidth restrictions and space restrictions of these free services, you probably won't be able to store MP3s directly on your website. Some may even disallow it because of the potential legal problems of music file downloading. Luckily, if you are the artist who performed the music on your MP3s, there are other sites that will host your files for free. The most popular, of course, being MP3.com. Any band can put their MP3s on MP3.com for free, and then link from their homepage to their MP3.com page.
Other Companies
Hopefully it goes without saying, but I am not an employee of any of the companies or groups listed in this article, nor do I know any employees of any of the companies listed in this article. They are just services I have used in the past and had good experiences with. Naturally, these are not the only options, and there are plenty of other choices out there which are almost (if not just as) good as these.
Portland (www.portland.co.uk) is a great alternative to Brinkster if your site is small and you aren't expecting many visitors. It is fully free and fully ad-free, just like Brinkster, and has been around forever, just like Brinkster. Portland is a full-service web host, not just a webspace provider, which means the email and masking services GoDaddy provides are not needed with Portland—they are a built-in part of the free Portland service. The limitation is that you only get 100 megabytes of bandwidth, which may last only one or two thousand visitors a month. In fact, the best solution overall may just be storing all your most vital HTML pages on a Portland account and all your images and other pages on a Brinkster account, thus getting the benefits of a full-service web host in Portland but fully stretching their small bandwidth allotment.
Other new alternatives pop up literally every day, so there are a few good forums for discussing all the new services. The forums at WebHostingTalk.com provide information on every host and every good deal out there. If you're only interested if you don't have to pay a dime, the forums at FreeWebSpace.net discuss only the free services. These forums are a great resource both if you found a good deal and want to find out how current customers view it or if you are just making a stab in the dark for the host that provides all the services you need. However be aware that the anonymity of the internet allows businesspeople to fake good reviews, so do not take a single glowing post on a message board as a solid referral.
You Get What You Pay For
Or at least that's what everyone says. There are a lot of bad free services out there. Most free services will sell your email address (so register with a Yahoo or Hotmail account other than your everyday one). Some do a lot worse, like redirecting "page not found" errors to adult sites. However, if you use services that have a good track record, like the ones above, there's not much to lose. The benefits of having a respectable, presentable webpage for only $8.95 a year are much greater than any hassles you'll encounter.
|
