I recently purchased a couple of domain names from Namecheap, but I don’t have hosting for them at the moment. I’m wondering if there are ways I can utilize these domains without having to pay for hosting.
I’ve heard about options like WordPress or Wix. Are these viable solutions, or do I need to look into other alternatives?
I have wix and needed to upgrade to add my own domain. They seem to have half price offers almost every week so I took advantage of that and paid around £110 for a year.
That sounds like a smart choice. I had premium hosting for a year, but it expired two days ago. Unfortunately, I didn’t see enough return on investment to cover the renewal costs. That’s why I’m looking for a free platform—so I can grow steadily without worrying about fees.
I completely understand! I’ve only been blogging for a few months and wanted to make sure I actually had readers before spending any money. I’m not monetizing my blog right now; I see it as just a hobby. I hope that someday I’ll be able to earn a little from it!
With the free option for WordPress, you can’t add a custom domain. I’m not sure about Wix.
However, you can use Cloudflare Pages to host your website. If you have WordPress set up on your local computer, you can use WordPress with Cloudflare Pages to host it for free, although comments won’t work by default.
If you can get free Google credits, you could host the backend there, use a plugin to convert it to a static site, and then host it on Cloudflare Pages (but again, comments won’t work). You can connect your main domain to this Cloudflare Pages site.
SEO will work in both cases, but you might need to do some basic setup.