Web Hosting advice...

[Genesis Knight]

I'm wanting to build a website, and I don't want to pay money for hosting. Can anyone give me some tips on which host to go with and how you actually get a site running at these places*? This isn't a super complicated thing I'm going after - I just want a simple place to put up some information about one of my novels.

* As in, do you have a WYSIWYG editor or do you upload an HTML file from an external program? Or neither? :p

[extrarice]

Check with your ISP, sometimes they provide hosting with your connection plans. As for making a website in WYSIWYG or uploading, some free hosts, like Geocities and such, have basic site templates where you choose a few basic layouts and they do the rest. There are many WYSIWYG editors out there that will handle the uploading for you (Adobe GoLive/Dreamweaver springs to mind).

Personally, I prefer hand-editing code, but that's because (1) I know how to do it, and (2) I hate the output of WYSIWIG editors.

[David J.]

I've used MSword, but it adds too much extra code, so if you want to tweak it by hand or something, it's a real pain in the ass and messy.

[Ash]

If you dont want to pay any money and have a relatively decent hi-speed home connection just run a webserver from home. With Win2k Pro, or even XP Pro IIS is built in to do such things, and Linux alternatives such as Fedora core with Apache is cheaper yet. As long as your not supporting thousands of connections per hour it'll get the job done.

[Mr Smith]

Geocities is a great place to have a website (our first tournament site lived there). They have a lot of nifty tools as well an HTML editor and the ability to upload webpages.

[extrarice]

If you dont want to pay any money and have a relatively decent hi-speed home connection just run a webserver from home. With Win2k Pro, or even XP Pro IIS is built in to do such things, and Linux alternatives such as Fedora core with Apache is cheaper yet. As long as your not supporting thousands of connections per hour it'll get the job done.
That solution requires a bit more technical knowledge than the OP wants to invenst, I think. ;)
Besides, the idea of running ANY sort of publically accessible services on any Windows platform makes me shudder.

[Elusive]

Google Pages has great bandwith, and it's pretty much a WYSIWYG deal.

Geocities goes down pretty easily, and has those awful, awful screen filling sidebars.