The cost of building a website has been reduced to a large extent nowadays. It is better to set up a cheap website, to have a start on the web to figure out if this field is really meant for you or not.

Five-Dollar Domains
The less popular domains such as .info, or country specific domains are available for a small cost of less than $5. The smaller countries domains such as .tk offer domains for free.

Free Software
The easy availability of free softwares as well as scripting languages has enabled people to build websites for free. It is commonly believed that the free software programs would not work as well as the paid ones, but that is not correct at all times. For example, to set up a forum the free php BB as well as vBulletin work, which is the largest seller of the forum software.

Templates
Most of the free design templates that come along with the softwares are perfectly adequate for your website. A good alternate to this are sites like templatemonster.com, which offer suitable templates for your website and also cost a small amount.

Pay as You Go Hosting
Most of the hosts have now turned to offer 'pay as you go' hosting, instead of a monthly pay for hosting. This helps reduce the running cost as most of the new websites do not make use of all the features and bandwidth that they pay for.

Guerrilla Marketing
Marketing is the thing that consumes the maximum amount while running a website, whether you aim for banner ads or ads in the search engines. The use of the Guerrilla techniques can save a lot of money. Guerrilla techniques include techniques such as involving yourself in Online communities which might be an interesting feature in your site. The best free marketing technique is the Search Engine Optimization, which means building your site in a way which increases its search engine rankings and attracts free visitors to your site.

Taking it Further
It is an incorrect notion that once you start to have a lot of visitors on a low-budget website, you need to upgrade it. You might want to buy the prestigious .com domain or hire a professional web designer, but you are unlikely to see any real benefits even after you spend huge amounts on software and hosting. So, designing an inexpensive website is the most sensible thing to do.