What do you need to make a website?

Making a website these days is incredibly easy to do, and cheap. Like you pointed out, the only thing you really need is a domain name (roughly $15.99 for a dot com), and some server space to host your site. You can get incredibly cheap hosting if its just a personal site for about $5/month or $50/year.

The downside to that cheap hosting is that its "shared hosting". The means there is a server someone hosting your website, but is also sharing probably several hundred others. This shared hosting is not good for reliability as instabilities in the server due to the other websites on it can cause your website to suffer.

To get the level of uptime that you need for a popular website you have to get a dedicated server. A dedicated is a server that solely hosts your website. Minimum prices on these are around $65 for bare minimum. Right now after we did the upgrade to Questional we were going to go a step above the minimum server, but were offered such a good price we opted to go a "step 3" server. Quad core 2.4 GHZ machine with 4096mb ram and 120GB hard drives. Pretty fast and only hosts us!

But starting a website is super easy, knowing how to code the site is another deal. It takes so much hard work to get a website out, and most don't who try to be honest. If you have any other web design questions please do post them and I'll definitely give an answer ;)

If you are just learning I suggest learning some HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Get a website on freewebs.com then learn PHP and then MYSQL. After you master them get a hosting or buy a dedicated server.

	Nagare -  1615 pts -  (2 years ago)
	freewebs = webs.com now and they both suck to me. The loading times are also ridiculous

All you really need is hosting and an IP address given from that. The only languages I know are HTML and CSS which make a pretty good site on their own.

my first actual page: http://fbla.projectawings.com