A
question that I frequently hear is "Do I really need
to have my own domain name?" The one word answer is
"YES.". If you put up your site with some of the
free web hosting services, the only company who
benefits is the web hosting company. The last person
who benefits is you. There are a number of reasons
why having your own domain name is a must:
1) When
you have your own domain name, the address of your
web site will be of the form
http://www.yoursite.com. On the other hand, if you
put up your site on one of the free servers, the
address of your web site will be something like
http://www.somefreewebsite.com/yoursite/. Which of
these two sounds more professional? Which of these
two is smaller and is hence easier to remember? I
leave you to make the judgement.
2) The
only way to make money online is to build up
credibility among your customers. Having your own
domain name is the first step in doing that. Your
customers will feel more comfortable buying whatever
it is that you are selling if you have your own
domain name. It makes your customers feel that they
are dealing with a large, established company,
rather than with some fly by night operator.
3) When
you have your domain name, you can have multiple
email aliases of the form alias@yoursite.com. This
allows you to assign different email aliases to
different functions, all of them pointing to your
actual email address. Hence, for example, for
questions related to the products and services that
you sell, you can have an email address like
sales@yoursite.com. For questions related to the
newsletter that you publish, you can have an email
address like editor@yoursite.com. For
comments/suggestions about your web site, you can
direct your customers to feedback@yoursite.com or
webmaster@yoursite.com. Having different email
addresses for different functions not only makes it
easier for you to filter your email using your email
client program (Eudora Pro, Pegasus Mail, Outlook
Express etc.), but also gives your customers the
impression that yours is a large, established
company with whom it is safe to do business.
4) Many
search engines give a lot of emphasis to the home
page of a particular domain, i.e. other things
remaining the same, a home page of a domain will
often rank higher for a particular keyword than any
other page. When you use some of the free hosting
services, your index.html page is the home page of
your site, but not of that domain. Hence in these
search engines, your site will find it very
difficult to make it to the top 20 or top 30, let
alone the top 10 for some of the really competitive
keywords. Just think of the amount of traffic that
you will lose if this happens.
5) Some
search engines are now refusing to spider the web
sites which are hosted by the free web hosts. For
instance, if you have a site hosted by the free web
hosts, you would, until recently, have got the
infamous error message saying that too many pages
have been submitted from your site if you tried to
submit your site to
AltaVista.
While
AltaVista
now says that "your URL has been submitted for
processing" if you try to submit your site, rest
assured that it will not spider any site belonging
to many of the free web hosts even though it says
that your site has been accepted. Can you afford
that?
6) When
your site is hosted by some of the free web hosts,
you will find it very difficult to get it listed in
a major directory like
Yahoo!.
Although
Yahoo!
will never admit that it won't add a commercial site
which is being hosted in one of the free web hosts,
in practice, it will be a miracle if you can get
your site listed by
Yahoo!!.
Listing your site with
Yahoo!
is difficult enough even when you have your own
domain.Ask
jeeves
Don't make your task more difficult than what it
needs to be.
If you
do not currently have a domain name, are you
convinced that you need one right now? The small fee
that you pay per year for your own domain name is
peanuts compared to the benefits that you get. You
can check out the availability of domain names and
register new domains above.
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