Posts: 10,688
Name: Steven Bradley
Location: Boulder, Colorado
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If you want other people to get to your site then you're going to have to buy one.
If you're asking to set up an intranet then you can set up a server and use that internally. But it wouldn't really be a domain in the same sense.
They do need to be managed otherwise you and I could both set up the same domain, say abcde.com. Now what happens when someone else types in abcde.com into a browser? Where should the browser go.
What's basically going on when you register a domain is that domain is getting assigned to an IP address, which at first will be an IP controlled by the registrar. Your purchase of the domain allows you to point it at other IPs so when you get hosting somewhere you can set your domain to point to your server.
There are Domain Name Servers around the internet that map a domain to an IP. That way when someone types in the domain the parts of the network that need to know understand where to route things.
There's obviously more detail to it than what I just described, but the basic answer to your question is you can't just create a domain and host it so anyone can access it. If you could the internet would become worthless in about an hour.
If you set up something like Apache on your computer you can access it by typing localhost into the address bar or the IP 127.0.0.1. The domain example.com is reserved for you to be able to use that on your internal network and you can set up things like subdomain.example.com
You can do quite a lot of things if you only plan on people inside your network accessing your site, but if you want it available to the general public you'll need to pay for a domain name.
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