There are a ton of places on the web that will host your personal website for free. These sites usually give you 1MB to 100MB of disk space at no real cost to you. I say no real cost because there is always a catch (of course). Each provider wants a little something different but most revolve around showing banner adds while people are looking at your site. Some want you to use their website as your web portal and others keep track of who visits your website and may fill their screen with pop up windows (I hate those things).
Your URL, the thing you type in your browser to get to your web site, usually isn't as nice as www.heeschen.us, it is more like http://personal.lig.bellsouth.net/~pokelace but it is free. A good place to find free website providers is www.freewebsiteproviders.com. They try to list every free provider out there and present it to you as a big comparison table so you find the kind of provider you want quickly and easily.
How did you get onto the web? It is very likely that your ISP (Internet Service Provider) not only gives you access to the web and email but also provides you your own website. Many of them do this as part of your normal monthly access charge and some want a few bucks extra for the privilege. Visit your ISP's homepage or call them up to find out.
www.heeschen.us used to be hosted at personal.atl.bellsouth.net/lig/p/o/pokelace which is my personal website that my ISP gives me for no extra charge. I have changed the location and hosting of www.heeschen.us from my personal website (read on to find out more).
If you gotta do it then go ahead; spend the money. If you need a more industrial strength website (lots of storage, fancy scripting, lots of hits, professional help) then the for profit guys are for you. They can give hundreds of megabytes of storage, personal assistance in setting up your website or special bells and whistles to make your web page look like a video game (I'm not kidding).
Additionally, if you want to register your own personal domain like www.heeschen.us you will have to turn to folks like this. They will provide you a way to search for an available domain name, buy it and either park it, redirect it or setup a your page there. Parking a domain is a way to put your domain someplace while you setup your web page by one of the three methods I've talked about. If you have them host your website then they will take care of getting the name and directing people to your website. If you are a cheapskate, then redirecting is for you! Once you park the domain with them then you tell them the URL of your El Chaepo website and they will redirect anyone to that other site when they type your domain. This is how www.heeschen.us used to work.
Be careful! Some slimeballs run a real racket with domain name registration. They tell you that they will get your domain name, setup your website and wax your car for just about nothing (Hah). When you read the fine print you find out that they registered the domain in their name and not yours. If you want to move your domain to another hosting outfit they tell you it will cost $500 (yikes). Or your second year is some terrible price. In either case you are stuck because you lose your domain or pay through the nose for your domain in the end.
I got www.heeschen.us from www.godaddy.com and I have had a very pleasant and affordable experience. This is not an endorsement just my experience. They told me all their costs up front, registered www.heeschen.us in my name, made it easy to get setup, make it free and easy to change any of my configuration and easy and free to walk away if I'm not satisfied. I bought my domain for $15 bucks a year and I redirect it for $10 per year; not a bad deal. I could have bought the domain for $9 per year but that is only for www.heeschen.com, www.heeschen.net or www.heeschen.org; they were all taken. www.heeschen.biz was still available last I checked (that will cost you $15). You can probably find cheaper deals or ones with more to offer but I thought these guys were very up-front about things and had a decent price.
Just lately I switched from El Cheapo hosting through my ISP and domain redirecting through Go Daddy to professional hosting through Page-Zone (page-zone.com). To the outside world nothing is different except the URL remains constant as www.heeschen.us (instead of changing to personal.atl.bellsouth.net/lig/p/o/pokelace after entering the site). All the pages, look and feel remains the same. Again, I'm not endorsing Page-Zone but I am having very good service from them. Now that I have professionally hosted the site I get some extras:
You need to be a little more savvy to set this up but with a little persistence anyone can make it work.
Do you need a website? Probably not but they are fun. It is my sincere desire to keep www.heeschen.us for this family and provide a link to all of the family members who want one. I have no desire to charge for this since it costs almost nothing to run ($25 per year for the El Cheapo approach and now $50 for the professional one). I promise to put your information on the website only if you ask me to and take it down whenever you want. If I get it wrong let me know and I'll correct it (try not to change your mind every week please).
Enjoy,
Dave