So I've tried to think of things I've been asked more than once. And one is the title there: everybody and his brother Simon, King of the Witches, has a website or blog or whatnot that they own. Their own domain, their own corner of the Web. Do you need one too?

The answer is honestly probably not. But the main question you need to ask yourself is: what are you trying to accomplish?

Most people just want a place so that they too can be heard. Read. Whatever. If you just feel like blogging about your cat, then perhaps you don't really need your own site. You might be fine with using your Facebook account, or even that old standby LiveJournal or just going and getting a mycatrocksyourface.whatever.com at some place like Wordpress.com.

Seriously. They're free, there's no infrastructure for you to support, and your cat's three fans can read up on its latest adventures and whatever you dressed it in this week.

However, let's say that your cat is the inspiration for your webcomic and you've set your cat up as a character–as though he or she were the one editing your webcomic. And let's say that someday you'd like to turn My Cat Rocks Your Face into the next webcomic-into-real-comic breakthrough hit. Then yes, you might want to get your own domain and roll that way.

Where you get your own domain hosted is an interesting question. If you don't want to involve a lot of money up front, then I would say go to some place like Dreamhost, because they are ridiculously cheap. They also, if you are not technically savvy (and your cat is content to be the star and let you, its agent, do all the work), have one-click installs of stuff like Wordpress so you don't have to deal with it. They even now have one-click "easy" installs–you get less ability to customize, but you also don't have to know anything about Wordpress or PHP or FTP or PCP or any other acronym that you really don't want in your life.

There are other cheapy hosting services out there and I can't really advise you on all of them. Your best bet is to get a referral from somebody you trust who's done this before. But just be aware: if you get some $9.99/month deal for a crazy amount of shared hosting space, then you shouldn't be surprised if you run into problems. Remember: you're paying thirty cents a day, basically, for scads of bandwidth and cycles and whatnot. And the Get What You Pay For axiom is in effect. Please do not be one of these total asses who freaks out if your server goes down for an hour…an hour which cost you somewhere around a few pennies. You're probably sharing that server with 500 other sites (or something) and if you're the nice one of the bunch, you'll go further.

If you're just starting out, you might be fine with this setup. Once your cat has become the star of its own animated My Cat Rocks Your Face series where he's voiced by Paul Welker or something, then you can no doubt afford a serious production-level (translation: doesn't go down that often) site. And you can probably afford to pay somebody to learn all of those pesky acronyms as well. Because again, you shouldn't be running a serious business on $9.99 hosting if it's acting like $9.99 hosting.

Some other odd thoughts on this:

1) Know when you've outgrown your current hosting plan. Watch for notices that you're using up too many cycles. And by cycles I mean computer processor time not, you know, the unicycles your wacky cat will enhance with artificial intelligence in the young adult novel My Cat Rocks Your Face, Vol. 2: Cat Goes Carny! Wordpress is excellent at eating resources, so utilize any online help the hosting company comes with, utilize your friends who are more tech savvy, and squeeze whatever life you can out of it. But if you start to have downtime that is unacceptable in your opinion, move. (I'll probably do a later post with Wordpress plugins you need. Not that are nifty, but that you actually need.)

2) Your hosting company might let you upgrade. Some companies will offer shared hosting (the cheap stuff), virtual private hosting (the better stuff) and then a dedicated server (the expensive but worth it stuff). So before you're dead in the water on your resources–but maybe starting to enter the doldrums–investigate and know what your options are.

3) If you snag a domain name, make sure it's with somebody you're not hosting with. This is just some of my own paranoia here, perhaps, but it's an issue of Single Point of Failure. If you start to have difficulties with your hosting company, your domain names aren't in their clutches and you can point them elsewhere easily.

4) Try to avoid becoming technically savvy if you're not already. And I mean this with all honesty. If you can get away with not knowing, just don't know. Whether a family member has been roped into being your admin, or you can afford to pay for somebody to be your admin, or whatever it is…if you don't have to become a webmaster, just trust me: don't.

One last thing to be aware of: if you do start a site, remember: a site that hasn't been updated recently is worse than no site. So if you are trying to run some kind of business on a website, make sure you or somebody is on hand to deal with it.