Ultimate Guide To Free Webspace and Domain Name – Part 1

Well, we all love free stuff, no doubt about it. And many of us love blogging, no doubt about that too. I was confronted by many of my friends asking me was it possible to get a free domain and web host anywhere on the internet. And as many of you may know, the reply is a flat “No.”

But, there are ways of getting close to it. For instance check out thevoodoo.co.cc. Yep, doesn’t it look great. WordPress is installed, and I have 10 GB of webspace, and 20 GB of monthly traffic allowance. Good enough for a price of zero right ?

Well there are many reasons to why someone doesn’t want to pay for stuff like this.. for eg, people like me who aren’t wanting to waste my dad’s cash on something I cannot commit myself to.. or someone who doesn’t have a credit card, or someone who isn’t too serious about it..

Anyways, here’s a guide to setting up your free webspace of 10 GB and domain name of type http://yourdomain.co.cc, and you can have any CMS like WordPress or Joomla up and running within 15 minutes, and your own personal email id in the form of yourname@yourdomain.co.cc, and say 500 more like those, having around 6 Gb of space each and other services like calendar, documents etc, now thats like 1 Tb of webspace completely for free. Even if you want it just to upload or backup your files. Here goes.

First the webspace…

1. Go to http://10gbfreehost.com and sign up for a free account.
2. Complete the form, and preferably give a gmail address as your email address. (Yahoo and Hotmail will work fine in most cases too.)
   Note: Remember the username you provide. It will be the subdomain of your webspace. Eg, you will be getting your webspace at yourusername.10gbfreehost.com. (Too long to remember ? Don’t fret. I’ll get you a shorter and sweeter one soon.)

3. Go to your inbox. If you do not see a mail titled Confirm your registration at 10gbfreehost.com, check your Spam/Bulk Folder.
4. Open the mail and click on the activation link. It should lead you to another form.
5. Filling the form will be easy. Make sure you enter the same password as you entered in the previous form ( in step 2 ). Also, leave the Extra Domain field blank because I don’t think you have one
6. Click Submit. A confirmation page will appear for some seconds and will redirect to another page asking you to visit their forum if you need help.
7. Ignore that message and sign in from the sign-in box on the top right of the page.
8. Once signed in, you will land on the Control Panel Page and you have successfully given yourself webspace of 10Gb at yourusername.10gbfreehost.com. The Control Panel page looks like this :
   
   
9. OK. Now it’s totally up to you. This is YOUR 10 gigs and you can do whatever the hell you want with it. You can view http://yourusername.10gbfreehost.com for a file some instructions and restrictions.
10. Click on FILEMANAGER and download index.html ( the file I referred to in Step 9. Better have a copy. It’s quite useful). Now you can replace this with your own index.html and then http://yourusername.10gbfreehost.com will point to that file. So, be creative, hit FrontPage or Dreamweaver if you loathe HTML. If you rather slog and code, it’s worth it. Then upload all your stuff using FILEMANAGER. To return to Control Panel anytime, look for a link on top saying View Your Control Panel. If you need help setting up WordPress, hang on and read along!
    
    
11. Another option is to use WordPress or Joomla or any CMS. Click ADDONS on Control Panel and you will get a huge list of weird looking words. Don’t worry, just Google them and see if you like them. I reccommend WordPress. But, before you do that, you will have to access MYSQL SETUP from the right hand side menu. I will describe how to setup wordpress in the following steps.
12. After clicking MYSQL SETUP, you will be confronted with creating databases and users. It’s okay don’t worry. Quite easy. The first few lines will look like this :1. Create Database
    Database Name
    Only lowercase English alphabet letters, digits and $. Maximum of 53 characters
13. In the textbox after yourusername_,  type wp and click Create Database
14. You will return to the same page after a confirmation page stating the change has been successful and the text box will be empty. Don’t worry you’ve created your Database unless any error message pops up. In that case just try again.
15. Now scroll down and you will read this :2. Create User
    

    Username Only lowercase English alphabet letters, digits and $. Maximum of 5 characters.
    Password Please enter the same password twice. It may consist of any 5-15 characters.

16. Type wordpress in the text box corresponding to username, and any password you like in the two text boxes corresponding to password. As mentioned, enter the same password twice

17. Again you return to the same page after a confirmation page. Scroll down further to this :

    3. Assign Privileges

    Username	hardikruparel_wordpress
    Database.Table	hardikruparel_wp.*
    INSERT SELECT UPDATE DELETE CREATE ALTER DROP LOCK TABLES INDEX If you are unsure what these are, leave all the options checked otherwise your database may not operate correctly.

    Ignore the hardikruparel part here, for you it will be yourusername_wp and yourusername_wordpress respectively. Make sure all text boxes are selected and click Assign Preveliges.

18. Again a confirmation page will appear and bring you back to the same page again.  Scroll down to Preveliges and make sure the previlges to the username yourusername_wordpress are assigned to yourusername_wp.

19. That’s it. You’re pretty much done with the hard part of setting up your WordPress blog. Now click View your Control Panel on the top right of page. On right hand side menu click ADDONS again and select the radio-button on the left of WordPress. Now scroll back up again, and in the text box labelled Target directory: , type the name of the directory you want your wordpress blog in. If you want it to appear in a subdirectory like http://yourusername.10gbfreehost.com/blog, then type “/blog” (without quotes).
20. No scroll down again and click Install Now. Wait, it’ll take some time and if installed successfully it may take you to some wordpress page giving an error. No worries. No matter where you end up, Just type/paste this in the address bar of your browser:http://yourusername.10gbfreehost.com/wp-admin/setup-config.php
21. Read the page that comes up. The last line will be:”In all likelihood, these items were supplied to you by your ISP. If you do not have this information, then you will need to contact them before you can continue. If you’re all ready, let’s go!”Click on let’s go and fill up the form as follows if you’ve followed my instructions exactly :

    Please type the password you chose and not (whatever you chose).

22. Click Submit. And now you’ll get a page like this :
    
23. Click installing now and you’ll get a page like this :
24. Now click on First Step. Fill in the name of your blog and your email id. Click Continue to second step.
    
25. This mesage will appear for a few seconds :Now we’re going to create the database tables and fill them with some default data.After that, the page will refresh and will look like this :

    Note down the username and password carefully and click on login on top or  wp-login.php at the bottom.

26. Login to the website using the username and password provided in the previous page.
27. Welcome to the administrator’s area of your new wordpress blog ! But HOLD ON ! First thing you have to do is to reset the password to something you can remember. I’m sure you will lose that random string somwhere ! So on top right corner which says,

    Howdy, yourusername. [Sign Out, My Account]

    Click on My Account.

28. Scroll down to the page that opens and on the right, update your password with something you can remember. Type it twice and click Update Profile on the bottom right corner.
29. That’s it you’re done ! I’m sure the effort is worth it. Because wordpress blogs are highly customizable and there are so many themes and plugins I’m sure you’ll enjoy googling it. Find some themes at http://themes.wordpress.net/ and plugins at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/
    
30. For help on how to install themes and plugins, please check my blog after a couple of days or just google it.This is End Of Part 1. You have your free webspace. In Part 2, I shall explain how you can get your domain and professional looking email ids of the form yourname@yourdomain.co.cc. Mind you they aren’t just email forwarding applications, but each email id is a full fledged GMail account with over 6 GB of space.Check back for part 2 soon !