Do you have 15 minutes and 15 dollars? Do you want to create your own personal website and have the full power of an easy to use database on the back end? Well, if so then Force.com has you covered! I used Force.com, some super simple HTML, a 15 dollar domain name registration from www.godaddy.com, and 15 minutes of my time and created a personal website (http://www.corycowgill.com). Its not real pretty at the moment, but the point of this is you can setup a site in 15 minutes. :)
Salesforce gives away free Force.com Licenses to anyone. These are production instances, NOT the developer edition instances you can also get for free. The Free Force.com edition gives you 1 GB of data, 100 Force.com user licenses, 250,000 page views, and some other goodies. You can sign up here to get your own free instance: https://www.salesforce.com/form/signup/freeforce-platform.jsp .
When you sign up for the Free Force.com edition, go ahead and setup your Force.com Site. You can follow this guide here: http://wiki.developerforce.com/index.php/An_Introduction_to_Force.com_Sites.
When you create a Force.com Site, it will provide you a URL like http://free-12415f14c3a-124e539428a-12dbf2f8eb2.force.com . Great, so we have a public website, but we don't have a very friendly name. No problem. Go to any DNS registrar, like GoDaddy, and you can register a domain name. Then use a CNAME to point to your Force.com Site. There is a guide here that lets you do that: http://developer.force.com/cookbook/recipe/registering-a-custom-domain-for-your-force-com-site .
This is another reason why I love working with the Force.com Platform. It makes your life super simple. You don't have to deal with Web Servers, Database setup, Email Services, Security setup, ETC. When you deploy a Force.com Site, you get the features of Salesforce.com like the Database, Secutity, Email Services, ETC.
Stat Tracker
