How to create your personal blog for free

Introduction

Creating a blog has never been easier than how it is today. Whether you're a passionate blogger, a writer, a story-teller or perhaps some professional who likes to share knowledge with peers or express creativity, starting a blog website is a fantastic way to engage with an online audience. Now you may think it would cost fortune to start or some recurring bills, well I can assure you its certainly not the case. You can set up a blog website for Free, even if you're not tech-savvy. In this guide, we'll walk you through the steps to get your own blog up and running without spending a dime.

First, Lets take a look at the ingredients - basically what all is required to start a blog. You'll need the following

• A Domain Name
• Hosting
• A website template

Now lets take a deeper dive into what actually cost money.

Domain Name

If you don't know already, what we call internet actually functions only with IP addresses. Now an IP address can be an IPv4 (numeric quadrets of the form X.X.X.X where X can be [0-255]) or IPv6 (alphanumeric hextet of the form X.X.X.X.X.X where X can be an alpha numeric). But, you can imagine, its extremely hard to remember all these numbers. Human mind can only remember a set of numbers, not all the number you come across.

A solution came was created for this. The solution is, to create a mapping of these IP addresses to some meaning yet short words which can still be remembered. We call it a Domain.

So, A domain name is something that maps to an IP address behind the scene, but is easy to remember.

Normally, you only lease the domains for specific time period. Technically, you do not hold ownership of that domain. Although, many companies call it like that, basic marketting gimick.

Anyway, you need to register a domain to be able to use it. To do that, you can pick any one service and compare its price and services with other provider and choose what is best for your use-case. There's a list of domain name registrars - Godaddy, Namecheap, dynadot, ionos, strato etc.

But before you go and make a purchase, let me also inform you about the subdomains. So, you only need to purchase a domain if you intend to monetise it with ads or if you are planning to build an audience. Basically, what I intend to say is, if you do NOT want to invest any money, there's a way for that too.

You actually won't get a domain, but rather a subdomain.

What's the difference, you'd ask? Well, a domain is of the form say, simarmannsingh.com, whereas as subdomain is anything prepended to the domain itself, for example, life.simarmannsingh.com. To register a subdomain, you must have rights to register a subdomain on a domain. So, in the above case, I already have purchased the domain simarmannsingh.com, so I hold the rights to register subdomain.

You might be thinking, how could you get a free subdomain without registering a domain them? There are some companies that offer a generous free tier to everyone. For example Netlify

After having sorted the domain, let's take a look at the next requirement.

Hosting

You need some space where you would keep the website files actually. That's called Hosting. It could be a cloud service like Hostinger, Hostgator, Netlify, Github-Pages etc or it could be some server stacked on a rack in the IT room of some company. It could also be your regular computer or laptor you work with or a small mini computer device like Raspberry Pie which draws least power.

It totally depends on the use-case.

I personally like Netlify and this is Not some paid appreciation. I have tried a couple others too. Before this, Heroku was the default favourite of every web developer due to the generous Free tier they used to offer.

After they stopped their free tier, Netlify is the next favorite, because of the same reason.

You can find a list of many hosting providers on one of the other bllog post I posted some time back here.

After a carefull analysis, you can decide whichever Hosting platform you prefer.

Next thing to decide is the Website template itself.

Website Template

Finally, you need a website template. As much as I would want to promote my own template Silverlux with demo available here, I am bound to inform you about the vast number of themes (both free and paid) that exists already. A quick google search with keywords free website themes would bring a lot of interesting links.

But here I am also posting two of my personal favourite sites where people share their work in the form of website themess (both free and paid). They are :-

1. https://statichunt.com/
2. https://jamstackthemes.dev/

Both the above sites offer tons of themes, which can be used for a variety of use-cases like blog, a business website, a podcast series, a product introduction, a promotion website, a campaign website etc.

After going through the list, lets say you selected the theme Silverlux, the next thing you can do it click on the blue button below (also present on the github repository page), enter details click next.

You'll be prompted to enter some information, possibly to also create an account on some version control website like github or bitbucket. But creating an account is basically how you create your account anywhere else. Just enter your details and click next.

Finally, you can go to this path, click the options on the right hand side, and click Edit site name. https://app.netlify.com/sites/<YOUR-WEBSITE-NAME>/configuration/domain

Note

The deployed website has Top Level domain .app, So, your website will be example.netlify.app. While the main website for netlify is netlify.com. Don't get confused here.

Conclusion

Finally, you should have your blog ready

To access the admin page of the blog, you can visit https://<YOUR-SUBDOMAIN>.netlify.app/admin

And there you have it, a fully functional blog, free of cost. Enjoy blogging and keep sharing your knowledge with your peers.

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Feel free to comment your opinions or questions down below. I'd be happy to read them