The ten dollar website.
Note: The site I’m linking to is just an example, don’t judge.
Over the last few months I’ve been playing around with CSS & basic Javascript. Not that I want to be a programmer, but in my day to day work it helps a lot to know what’s possible in the browser. It keeps the developers happy, and I don’t feel like I’m losing track of current trends and technologies that might be useful for upcoming projects.
So I’m pretty comfortable with a site in folders in my desktop, but at some point it’ll have to go live and walk the earth. Or bump around on Designer News for a day and half and then disappear forever (likely).
Hosting is tricky for beginners, and can be quite expensive. Especially if people decide your domain is worth visiting. After a few hours of research, and suffocating amounts of programmer-speak (I black out when I hear the word “commit”), I found a decent solution.
So is it possible to host a folder containing a few text files? Yes.
You’ll need a Dropbox account (free), a domain name of your choice ($10) and about an hour out of your day. You can link to images from dropbox too but it seems to be a fair bit slower, so I just direct linked to Imgur for that (also free).
TL;DR: Don’t pay for hosting if you just have a simple website. Use Dropbox, and mask the domain with a few DNS tweaks.
Edit: Why doesn’t javascript work? :(
Edit II: Okay, sometimes you have to pay people money for things. It’s $5 a month for unlimited websites on GoDaddy so probably just do that.