What free actually costs

You can put a website online today without spending anything. The harder question — and the one almost nobody answers honestly — is which free route leaves you with something you can still use in two years.

Every free website offer is funded somehow, and knowing how tells you what you are trading. There are four common models and they have very different consequences.

Advertising. The host injects banners, pop-unders or a branded footer into your pages and keeps the revenue. Your content becomes the delivery mechanism for someone else's ads, and you have no control over what appears next to your writing.

The subdomain. Your site lives at yourname.someplatform.example. This is the most expensive free option and the one people underestimate most. Every link you earn, every search ranking you build, and every reader who bookmarks you is attached to a domain somebody else owns. Move later and you start from zero.

The crippled tier. 100MB of storage, no database, PHP disabled, no SSL, suspension if you get more than a trickle of visitors. It exists to make the paid plan look reasonable.

The genuine loss-leader. A full free trial, funded on the expectation that some proportion convert. This is the honest version, and the tell is that it has an end date rather than pretending to be permanent.

None of these are scams. They are business models, and for some projects any of them is fine. The mistake is choosing one without knowing which you picked.

Decide what the site is for first

The right answer depends almost entirely on what you are building, so it is worth being specific before you compare hosts.

A throwaway or a learning exercise. If the site exists so you can practise HTML or test an idea, optimise for zero friction. A permanently free host with a subdomain is perfectly sensible — you are not building anything you need to keep.

Something you want to grow. A blog, a portfolio, a business site, a community. Here the subdomain question becomes decisive, because the entire value of the project accumulates in the address. Get your own domain from day one, even if the hosting is free.

Something commercial. If the site will take money or represent a business that people judge you by, free hosting of any kind is the wrong tool. Not because it will not work, but because the failure modes — no support, no SLA, hard resource caps — are exactly the ones that hurt when there is money attached.

Get your own domain, even on a free budget

This is the single highest-value decision, and it costs about £8–£12 a year for a .co.uk or £10–£15 for a .com. It is the difference between building on rented ground and building on your own.

The practical benefits are immediate. Your email can be hello@yourname.co.uk instead of a Gmail address, which changes how people read your contact page. Your links look like yours when shared. And if you outgrow your host — which you will, if the project works — you point the domain somewhere else and every reader, backlink and ranking follows you.

Register it yourself, directly with a registrar. Avoid the “free domain with hosting” offers. They are free for year one, renew above market rate, and are frequently registered in a way that makes transferring away tedious. Owning it outright costs a few pounds and removes the leverage.

Pick something short, easy to say aloud, and free of hyphens or creative spellings. You will be reading it down a phone at some point.

Choose your building method

Three broad routes, roughly in order of how much you want to be in control.

A hosted platform such as WordPress.com, Wix or Squarespace. They handle everything, you write. Fastest to a live page, most restricted, and the free tiers typically carry advertising and reserve the good features for paid plans. If you never want to think about updates or backups, this is the trade.

Self-hosted WordPress. You run the software on your own hosting. Any theme, any plugin, your own analytics, your own advertising if you want it. In exchange you are responsible for updates and backups — largely automated now, but still yours. This is what most serious independent sites run on, and there is a reason for that.

Hand-written HTML or a static site generator. Fastest, most durable, least to go wrong, and genuinely the best answer for a portfolio, documentation, or a brochure site that will not change often. No database to corrupt, no plugins to update, no security surface to speak of. If you are learning web development, this is also the best place to put your work.

The setup, in the order that avoids rework

Doing these steps out of order is the most common source of frustration, mostly because DNS changes take time to propagate and everything else waits on them.

1. Register the domain. Do this first. Nothing else can be finalised until you know the address.

2. Point it at your host. Update the nameservers at your registrar to the ones your host gives you. Start this immediately — propagation usually completes within an hour or two, occasionally longer, and you cannot get an SSL certificate until it resolves.

3. While you wait, plan the pages. Most small sites need four: a home page, an about page, a contact page, and whatever the site is actually for. Sketch the navigation now rather than retrofitting it.

4. Install or upload. If you are using WordPress, a one-click installer such as Softaculous handles the database and admin account in about thirty seconds. If you are writing HTML, upload your files into public_html with an entry point named index.html.

5. Check HTTPS. Once DNS resolves, your certificate should issue automatically. Confirm the padlock appears, then force HTTPS with a short .htaccess rule so nobody lands on the insecure version.

6. Set up email on your domain. Create at least one mailbox. If you plan to send any volume, add SPF and DKIM records — missing them is the usual reason mail from a new domain lands in spam.

7. Then write. The temptation is to spend three weeks on the theme. The site that gets read is the one with something on it.

The mistakes that cost people the most

A short list, drawn from the questions that come up most often once a site is already live and the problem is expensive to undo.

Building on a subdomain you do not own. Two years of work, and the authority belongs to the platform. This is the big one.

Skipping backups because the host mentions them. Host backups are an operational safeguard for their infrastructure, not a guarantee for your data. Take your own, keep them somewhere else, and check occasionally that they restore.

Ignoring plugin updates. Outdated WordPress plugins account for the overwhelming majority of compromised sites on shared hosting — far more than anything involving the server itself.

Choosing on headline numbers. “Unlimited” storage and bandwidth are always bounded by a fair-use clause somewhere in the terms. A host that publishes real numbers is telling you more than one that publishes an impossible one.

Not reading what happens at renewal. £1.99 a month for the first three years, then £8.99, paid upfront, is a very different offer from the one on the pricing page.

A realistic budget

If you want your own domain and hosting that does not advertise on your pages, the honest annual figure is roughly £20–£30 for the first year on a budget host, and similar after. That covers the domain (£8–£12) and hosting (from about £12 a year at the cheap end, more typically £40–£80).

If that is genuinely out of reach right now, use a permanently free host and accept the subdomain — but know that you are choosing it, and plan to move before the site matters.

Traxio sits at the cheap end of that range: 30 days free with no card details required, then £0.99 a month, on the condition that you bring your own domain and that support comes from a community rather than a ticket desk. Whether that trade suits you depends entirely on the project, and there is a fuller honest comparison if you want to weigh it against the alternatives.