Building a Site on the Cheap

One of the ways I've been able to convince my wife to join me in this crazy escapade is to convince her we can do this fairly cheaply. And you can. The question is whether it's a good idea or not.

So far our expenses have been about $75 dollars for graphic editing software (used) and domain-name registration (we bought .com, .org, and .net just to make sure we don't get any copycat sites taking advantage of any domain confusion. Paranoid? Probably).

We want the site to have a main content section with an attached blog or two and a discussion board. There are two directions we could take on this.

The first is to just use existing hosting services. Our domain registrar gives us free space to set up our site, so that part would be simple. I've set up a website before, albeit a very simple, hand-coded HTML one, so I know I can do that much.

I could also use services like Blogger.com or WordPress.com for the blogs, and through some technical wizardry make our blog on their site look like it's on ours. The same could be done for the discussion board. It's free, and at least it looks easy. The only problem might be how much control we have--and whether we can migrate if we do decide to host everything ourselves at some point.

The other options is to pay for web hosting. My ISP has been quite good, and I know they'd treat me well. But to host a site is $50 to set it up, and then $25 per month after that. I'm not entertaining any delusions of being able to make $350+ our first year. And I'll soon be out of a job.

On the other hand, I could control every detail of the site, and could get the blog and discussion board software for free. I'd just have to figure out how to set it up. I'd be able to control every aspect of the configuration, which could be fun--and time consuming.

At some later date I'll need to add the e-commerce components to sell the ebooks. I'm fairly certain that would almost guarantee we'd need our own hosted site at that point. And I work in the technology industry. I know how the seemingly simple task of switching to one system to another can become a disaster. So it's very tempting to start out on the architecture I will eventually have to move to anyway, regardless of the cost.

Anyone out there tried this themselves? Any advice to give?