Hosting – Advantages of Having Your Own Website
Hosting your own wordpress website is the only way to run your online business. There are some good free “build a site” places around and it’s OK to try them, but you need your own website.
Domains
Lets talk about domains for a moment.
There’s always chatter about exact match domains. What this means is if you’re building a site about “large dogs”, if you find the domain “largedogs.com” you have an exact match domain.
The claims are that an exact match domain will give you an edge in the search engines. Your website will have a slight ranking edge when someone searches for large dogs.
A domain costs about $10.00 a year. The mini course we offer goes into this subject in more detail about.
Why Get Your Own Hosting Plan?
Hosting is relatively cheap, about $5.00 a month for a basic hosting plan. As mentioned, we use wordpress 99% of the time for our main websites. WordPress is free, it’s not hard to learn and it has a wide range of options. These options are called plug-ins, there are hundreds of them and most are free too.
Free website builders like blogger. They have improved templates that allows for easy customization of several post elements.
Free Site Problems – you always have to be aware of the fact that whoever owns the site can close it anytime, they can close your account anytime and you can loose all your website in a flash. To be fair, these sites don’t close accounts for fun, there is generally a good reason.
The second thing is selling your website. There could be a time when you want to sell your website. You cannot do this with a free platform.
The third thing is some do not allow advertising(adsense) or affiliate links. This restriction kills any chances you had to make money from that site.
The fourth thing is rankings. It takes more work to get these sites top search rankings. There was a guy who had the number one spot for “Making Money Online” who used blogger. One day his site vanished, Google had taken him down. It was later resolved, but it makes you think that if he had his own site on his own hosting, this wouldn’t have happened.
Free Sites – Feeder Sites
You can use free sites for feeder sites. Feeder sites are exactly what they sound like, they support your main website. You fill these sites with information related to your main site, then you feed links to your main site from them.
Feeder sites have a purpose, they support your main website. As mentioned, you need your own hosting for main sites and for good reasons. Besides some of the things mentioned before, these free website places come and go.
You spent months building a business on a free platform and one day you get a notice, it says “We’re Shutting Down”. Or you “Violated Our TOS” another common thing that happens, why risk it. Use several feeder sites, diversify, and this will solve the problem.
Next
If you’re serious about building an online income and want to do it right, you need your own hosting, domain and website.
When you have your own hosting and website you don’t have to worry about getting your account revoked, you can even sell your site.
In Internet terms we cal your website “Virtual Real Estate”.
