On setting up a new domain... Cheaply!

I've never had my own domain. The reason is simply that I haven't wanted to spend the money. I've had plenty of dyndns.org domains, which are free, and I've used those to alias my IP for remote desktop logins and such, but never my own domain name.

And then I realized: If I want a specific domain, like my name, and it's gone, I'm out of luck - and it's true: www.patrickmcneil.com is taken.

And THEN I realized: domains are only about $10/year! That's nothing! My idea of not wanting to spend the money originates about 10 years ago when domains were actually expensive and when I didn't have a credit card so I couldn't have gotten one anyways.

So anyways, I hopped on over to godaddy.ca and registered patrickmcneil.ca. It's $12/year and I got a 10% discount with the code DIGG1 (from the Diggnation podcast of course).

Now of course I need to deal with hosting for the new domain - basically you need a webserver somewhere that you point the domain at and host files/blogs/webpages/a mail server, etc.

I don't want to pay for hosting services (at the absolute minimum it's ~$5 a month and good ones start at ~$30/month - which gives you your own machine). My ISP (Shaw) doesn't want me to point my domain at my home IP address, and it's not static anyways. So what to do? Well I'll talk about that in my next post...