Why Get Your Own Domain Name?

Many people ask why they should get their own domain name (http://www.yourdomain.com) rather than use a free domain and hosting like Geocities, Bravenet, and Tripod provide. The simplest answer is that you get what you pay for.

However, let me go into details and outline the many problems with a free domain and hosting service.

Ads. All free hosting services use ads. This is how they can offer their service for free. They pay for it by the ads they place on your website. This can be a major pain for your visitors, and it may make some of them leave your site. This means less people purchasing your products.

Most free hosts have a very small data transfer allotment. This means that if you get too many visitors, or if your website just has too much data on it (usually caused by overly large images or too many images), your website will be shut down for a period of time. Geocities shuts it down for one hour. That is one hour that people are not viewing your website and thinking about purchasing from you.

Free hosting services usually have a much slower data transfer. This means that your website will load much slower than someone who has a website on their own domain with a paid hosting service. Depending on how graphically rich your website is, this can be the difference between a potential customer leaving or staying.

Professionalism. People associate a domain name with professional quality. Anyone can run out and get a free hosting service, but a professional usually gets a domain name. If you are making your website by yourself, paid hosting services usually have somewhat better page builder programs as well. Free page builders tend to result in a sloppy-looking website which makes not only your website look bad, but your company as well.

Unless you know how to use coding, you will miss out on an extremely important opportunity to promote your website. In order for search engines to "read" your website and place it in their listings, there has to be certain codes in place. These codes do things such as let the search engine know the title of your website, the keywords (the words and terms people use to search for your site), and more. Page builders, especially free ones, rarely put these in on their own.

With free hosts comes instability. With many of the free hosts, if you do not sign into your account within certain intervals, you will loose all of the data on your website! This means you have to totally redo your website. TIP: No matter whether you use a free host or a paid host, be sure to keep a copy of your website coding and images on a disk in case you lose your data. This makes redoing it as simple as uploading files to the proper directories.

Domains and paid hosting services allow a much greater freedom with your website. Free hosts usually have great restriction on the type of coding that can be used on your website. Many do not allow FLASH animation, PHP, etc. Certain coding types can be very advantageous in attaining high search engine rankings, and many of these are not supported by most free hosts.