The cheapest, easiest way to run a website and an email address. How to keep costs down, and gain the greatest ease of use when making a website and an email address with netnerd.com.
Register a domain.
The first thing you’ll need to decide when launching a website is the domain that you’d like to register. The domain forms part of the website’s address. For example, if the website address is https://www.netnerd.com the domain is netnerd.com.
The .com part is what’s called the top level domain, or TLD. Different TLD’s cost different amounts. The cheapest domains that we offer are the .uk TLD. You can register a domain ending in .uk or .co.uk for £3.99 plus VAT and annual renewals cost £6.99 plus VAT. This is significantly cheaper than some other domains, such as .bargains (£23.99 plus VAT to register) or .dog (£39.99 plus VAT to register).
You can choose the part before the .uk or .co.uk TLD, and it’s usually a good idea to choose something that’s memorable, easy to spell, and relevant to the subject of your website.
You can find out more about how to go about choosing a suitable domain on our blog post about selecting the perfect domain name.
Up front cost so far:
.uk or .co.uk domain registration £3.99 plus VAT
Ongoing cost: .
uk or .co.uk domain renewal £6.99 plus VAT annually
Buy web hosting.
The cheapest web hosting package we offer is the Starter Hosting package, which costs £10 plus VAT per year. This package provides:
- 250MB disk space
- Unlimited bandwidth
- 3 email accounts
- 4 databases
- Free SSL certificates
- Free Daily backups
Whilst 250MB isn’t a huge amount of disk space, it is enough to be able to run a website and an email address if you give some consideration to what you’ll use to create the website and how you’ll collect your emails.
All the “things you’ll need” when running any website are all built in for you. Certificates to gain the HTTPS and padlock in the browsers address bar are provided for free an automatically installed. Backups are built in and enabled by default, with backups being taken nightly and 14 restore points retained.
The hosting provided uses the cPanel hosting platform which provides a full suite of services that can be used to manage all aspects of your online presence. Full DNS management, a file manage, webmail, email deliverability management and much more is all available by default.
Up front cost so far:
.uk or .co.uk domain registration £3.99 plus VAT
Starter web hosting £10 plus VAT
Subtotal: £13.99 plus VAT
Total inc VAT: £16.79
Ongoing cost: .
uk or .co.uk domain renewal £6.99 plus VAT annually
Starter web hosting £10 plus VAT plus VAT annually
Subtotal: £13.99 plus VAT
Total inc VAT: £16.79
Create your website.
We provide the Weebly website builder for free if you’re looking for an easy way to manage your website.
Before we took on Weebly as a product we trialled numerous easy website builders with our customers, and Weebly came out on top as far as ease of use and functionality was concerned. It’s something that a lot of people agreed on as being the easiest way to make a website.
Not only is weebly easy to use, but it also works in quite a clever way with a lot done for you. For example, when you upload an image, weebly will automatically convert it in to a web friendly version. Also, when you create a page it also gets added to the menu structure of the site as well.
Weebly is also an external piece of software that publishes in to the hosting account you have with us, so Weebly itself doesn’t take up any space. The only thing that takes up space is the site files and images that you publish from within the Weebly site builder, rather than the weebly site builder taking up space. This isn’t normally the case with CMS’ as they usually operate from within the hosting account, so take up space. A basic WordPress installation will usually take up around 200MB of disk space.
Not only does weebly provide an easy to use website builder, but it’s use doesn’t consume disk space to the degree that other CMS’ do. This in turn allows you to use a smaller, low cost web hosting package.
Up front cost so far:
.uk or .co.uk domain registration £3.99 plus VAT
Starter web hosting £10 plus VAT
Weebly website builder FREE
Subtotal: £13.99 plus VAT
Total inc VAT: £16.79
Ongoing cost: .
uk or .co.uk domain renewal £6.99 plus VAT annually
Starter web hosting £10 plus VAT plus VAT annually
Weebly website builder FREE
Subtotal: £13.99 plus VAT
Total inc VAT: £16.79
Set up an Email address.
It’s very easy to set up an email address in cPanel, you simply click on:
Email accounts > Create
Then specify the part you’d like before the @ sign and the password, then click “create”.
That’s the mailbox made.
As you’ll receive emails and these will accumulate over time, this will take up disk space if you leave the emails in the mailbox you’ve created.
You can avoid the storing of emails by using POP3 to collect emails (instead of IMAP). The downside of doing this, is that the emails are only visible on the POP3 configured device. That said there is a way to work around this.
You can use Gmail to collect emails from a mailbox. To do this all you’d need to do is sign up for a Gmail account, and then within the Gmail account click on:
Cog icon > Settings > Accounts
Then in the “Check email from other accounts” section click on “Add an email account”.
You’ll be prompted for the email address of the mailbox you’ve created, the incoming mail server address which is mail.domain.com (you’ll need to replace domains.com with your actual domain) and the password.
Then, in the “Send mail as” click on “add an email address” then enter your name and email address and untick “treat as alias” (that part is important!).
Then click next and you’ll be prompted for the outgoing mail server address which is mail.domain.com (again you’ll need to replace domains.com with your actual domain) and the password. Enter these details and you’re done.
You’re now using the Gmail account like you would outlook or thunderbird or another mail client. The main difference is that Gmail operates in the cloud, so you can log in to your mailbox from anywhere.
As Gmail is collecting mails from your mailbox in cPanel and bringing these in to the Gmail account, no emails get stored in the cPanel mailbox. This helps keep disk usage minimal and keeps your costs down.
The other advantage of using Gmail like this is that you can add the Gmail app to your phone and tablets, enter your Gmail logins, and that’s the set up completed! You can then access your cPanel emails via the Gmail app on your devices.
Up front cost so far:
.uk or .co.uk domain registration £3.99 plus VAT
Starter web hosting £10 plus VAT
Weebly website builder FREE
Gmail account FREE
Subtotal: £13.99 plus VAT
Total inc VAT: £16.79
Ongoing cost: .
uk or .co.uk domain renewal £6.99 plus VAT annually
Starter web hosting £10 plus VAT plus VAT annually
Weebly website builder FREE
Gmail account FREE
Subtotal: £13.99 plus VAT
Total inc VAT: £16.79
In conclusion.
So there you have it, how to run an easy to use website and with a minimal cost with minimal effort. You can even collect emails on all your devices with a one off set up and configuration. The cost of doing this is only £16.79 per year. You can’t even buy a takeaway for that these days!
