Get your own website for only £3.47

As well as being a great place to chat with your friends and share your photos, MSN Spaces is also a free blogging tool. Like a lot of people, I’ve got an MSN Spaces account to which I’ve added my own blog. The only problem is, its address (jontys-blog.spaces.live.com/blog/?_ c02_owner=1) isn’t very catchy or easy to remember. It’s not the sort of name you can slip into casual conversation. So I decided to buy a proper domain name.

Domain names are cheap these days. Mine (http://www.jontys-blog.me.uk) cost me just £3.47 for a whole year from Fasthosts, so I still had change left over from a tenner after signing up for a two-year registration. There are plenty of different types of domain you can buy. A ‘.co.uk’ is usually the most popular for a UK web site, but I went for a ‘.me.uk’ since it’s the most personal and, conveniently, the cheapest.

Setting up the domain name and ‘forwarding’ it to my Spaces blog was remarkably easy (see the walkthrough below). To buy the name you’ll need to go through a web hosting firm (see ‘Web host options’, right) who will register the domain for you. Have your credit card handy and you’ll get your login details sent via email in about 20 minutes.

Domain names usually come with an email forwarding option; I’ve set my account up so that if somebody emails jonty@jontys-blog.me.uk it gets forwarded and comes through to Windows Mail like one of my regular emails. To do this, simply use the Email Forwarding options in the web-based control panel provided by your hosting company: you don’t need to change any settings in Windows Mail.

I name this blog...