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Details: Created: 09 March 2019

As a new author or an author that’s just starting to build momentum around your books, it’s a good idea to have a dedicated author website. However, in the beginning it’s advisable not to spend too much money so that you don’t get yourself into debt over your head while trying to promote and advertise your books. One of the ways you can control your costs is by choosing a free web hosting package at one of the many free hosting providers, like Weebly, Joomla Launch, Wix and Infinity Free. While free accounts are limited, they typically provide enough options for the beginning website.

1. Weebly

Weebly is probably one of the best known, if not the best known, free web hosting companies out there. The free Weebly plan offers quite a few features, including up to 10 webpages, autoindexing in Google Webmaster, 500mb of storage, a free weebly.com subdomain and SSL security. Sites that are located on Weebly can actually rank quite high in search engine results, which means that subdomain isn’t as damaging as it could be for site authenticity. This is probably because Weebly has a good reputation and is a reliable hosting provider. The free account does have some drawbacks. You won’t be able to change the favicon, and you won’t be able to attach a dedicated domain unless you purchase one of the paid options. You’ll also have Weebly ads on your site and an obnoxious partial banner on the bottom. However, you can use Google ads to monotize your site. Weebly’s paid hosting plans get pretty pricey very quickly. The Pro version is $12 a month or $144 a year. The business account is $25 per month or $300 a year. I recommend this site for it’s free version, especially if you’re a new author who simply needs to build his or her web presence. However, I do recommend that you keep backup copies on your computer of everything you post on Weebly and keep it well organized. Weebly offers no easy solution for getting your content off the site if you decide to change hosts.

The paid options weren’t viable for me because I don’t like drag and drop builders, and I felt like the options for design and layout were very limited, so when I was ready to move to a dedicated site with a real domain, I chose IONOS.

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Details: Created: 23 January 2019

As an author or a small business owner, part of getting the word out about your books and/or services is having a website where people can anonymously view your pages and read information about your services. If you are just starting out, you probably don’t want to pay for a website or even a hosting package because you want to control your overhead. Websites with domain names can run hundreds of dollars a year, depending on your chosen provider. One of the places you can get a free drag and drop website is Weebly, which is perfect if you don’t have any coding skills and you want something that is super simple.