Myth: "The Internet is Free"

This was never 100% true, but there are far fewer free Internet services or products today than even a year or two ago. You will need each of the following to be successful:

• Domain Name You might find some inexpensive registrars, but you won't find any for free.
• Site Hosting There still may be a few free hosting sources, but they usually have serious drawbacks: poor technical support, lack of features, unplanned downtime, limited disk space and so forth. If you have a truly small site, there are acceptable low cost hosting vendors. Sites with lots of traffic, large sites, or sites needing e-commerce features will need a high-quality hosting vendor.
• Site Design "Free" means to do it yourself. But do you have the proper tools? And do you know how to optimize page download speeds and insure cross-browser compatibility? Are you handy at coding HTML, Javascript and other scripting languages?
• Site Marketing There are many excellent search engines that allow free submissions, but for wide exposure and traffic you will need to use a few carefully selected paid subscription search services and directories.
• Site Maintenance Inevitably, there will be site changes, technical problems and so forth. You can provide this yourself if you can handle the technical items discussed in "Site Design" above, otherwise you will need to hire someone to do this.  

While there are still a few "freebies" on the Internet, generally you get what you pay for.