Summary: there is a crazy amount of bandwidth and processors that are mostly idle making web hosting a commodity. but even though you can get a web host for a year for less than $10 you might be getting exactly what you paid for. that is, a service that's worth about ten bucks. servers require somebody paying attention to them to stay running. you need to keep up with updates and patches otherwise your site won't be reliable. but even if the technology is up to date there may be so many sites running on the same server that none of them perform very well. all it takes is one badly configured blog to mess up the works for everyone. somebody wrote in before we recorded this asking, "don't you guys also like free services?" sometimes. there are lots of ways to get on the web. and some of these services are free. just about every single service has a free version. google, flickr, yahoo, wordpress, blogger and dropbox to name a few have tools that will get you and your company talking for no charge. but at what cost? advertising might get inserted into your content that you don't benefit from. or your data may be mined for information. you might not get access to stats or have limited stats. statistics is vital for your ego. you really want to know what things are popular. it helps you focus your efforts. and it's nice to know where your views or listeners are coming from. the problem with free is that you are subject to the whims of the free service. if you get DMCA'd they will act for the complainer on your behalf. when you control your own domain it's your choice on how to deal with your problem. free means that you are subject to advertising. this could dilute or confuse your brand. and the finally the service might not be that fast. that said, free stuff does have the benefit of being EASY to set up. you don't have to do anything other that pick a user name and a password. no nothing to update except for your words or pictures. but you really, really, really need to read the Terms of Service. sometimes the data you put there isn't yours after you put it there! your blog might not be sellable and who owns the movie rights? you might hit a wall and then have to move stuff and migration might not be easy every. the simplest services are are things like Mobile Me (formally dotMac). it's simple to make a site, post pictures, share files and update a blog. but sometimes it can be a very dead end if you care about bandwidth, stats, spaz email addresses (aka aliases) or an email address forwards things like united@ or fedex@ to your main email address. you can't run a specific server app that needs PHP or Ruby. other deal breakers might be the cost of storage or that it's aimed for personal use. besides that other software seems more cool these days. so the simple and the free are okay but you have to know that its not hard at all to have a real domain for not much money a month. and you don't need to be "all that IT!" to do the care and feeding of your own site. it's not that tough because there are tons of tutorials on everything. you will learn to search better because your new hobby will demand it. or course there are books on the subject. the Dummies book is just about as good as any of them. domains are cheap. 10 bucks is about what they go for. you can find a domain for cheaper but once again, be sure to read the TOS to know who really owns the name. we aren't fans of goDaddy. not because it's a bad service but because of the insane amount of marketing they do with every page load. as a domain administrator doing work it's just noise. or use our check list. here's the steps get a domain choose a server provider (http://knowtech.tv/choose-a-hosting-company-check-list/) point the DNS to your server wait for a few hours as DNS isn't always instant varies by domain type .tv takes a day while .com can update in like 12 seconds set up (don't worry this is all GUI based!) web server
