I am reluctant to recommend AOL for anything besides the most clueless
beginners but they do offer a US$4.95/month 3-hour timed account which
would give you so many megs of web space per screenname and something like
7 screennames. Just don't succumb to the lure of putting it into their
"Hometown AOL" thing which adds stupid headers and stuff in exchange for
more space. You can access the account via your existing ISP, too, since
the local AOL client will connect over the net and not need to use dialup.
A major plus if you are already on cable or DSL.
To avoid looking like an AOL lamer...get yourself a domain name for
whatever the lowest price you can find is, maybe $15 for a year. Then sign
up with an outfit like redirection.net to host the name. Not actual web
hosting that costs x bucks a month but just name hosting which means the
domain is put on their name servers. Using a web accessible control panel
you then set
www.yourdomainname.com to be mapped to existing web space
elsewhere, such as on your cheapo AOL account. (Naturally your site, if
extensive, can be spread all over the multiple screennames' web spaces.)
You can also set other non www addresses to map to other sites, such as
joe.yourdomainname.com or movies.yourdomainname.com... as many as you want.
And the name hosting also includes email forwarding for as many as
addresses as you want so joe DeleteThis @yourdomainname.com goes to some address and
filmgod DeleteThis @yourdomainname.com goes elsewhere. Naturally you set your email
program to pull mail from your ISP's mail server but have your new domain
name email address in the return address field.
An added bonus here is that should you decide to change ISP's you simply
adjust the forwarding and none of your correspondents need to learn a new
address...such a change is completely transparent to them. Ditto if you
move the web site to space on some other ISP.
US$5 buys a year of name hosting at redirection.net
So for just $4.95 a month + (about) $15/year + $5/year you have a real
website at your very own domain name and you send/receive email via this
domain as well. That works out to $6.61 a month. And that's if you have
no web space. If you have some space on your ISP you can of course skip
the AOL part.
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