Top 5 Reasons to Get Your Own Domain Name
I recently was asked what are the advantages of owning your own website. There are more than 5, but these are the best ones.
Credibility
I’ve said it before. If you give someone the opportunity to chose between two identical sites, one that is mysite.com and mysite.blogspot.com, they will chose the one on the domain.
I couldn’t say it better than what Chrisblogging said about blogspot.
“It may be free, but if you are serious you need your own host…”
Reliability
Some of you may remember when The Bestest Blog of All-Time was suspended due to violating blogger TOS. He was apparently flagged and warned, and his blog was taken down for over a month. Imagine if any of the A-List bloggers lost a month. They’d lose thousands of dollars.
By hosting your own blog, you can backup your files and if anything happened you can just upload them again, with little downtime.
Customization
When you have your own self-hosted wordpress blog, there are tons of ways to customize it and make it your own. With hundreds of themes, and hundreds of plugins, you can really make the blog your own and essentially, unique.
How many unique blogs have you seen on blogger?
Add-ons
With one hosting plan your possibilities are endless. Feel like adding a forum to your domain? Do it. Want to make a directory page, go ahead.
Maybe you start a blog, and it’s not working out for you. You can then turn the domain into something else completely if thats what you want to do. Obviously owning your website comes with power.
Professional and Branding
This bases on reason number 1, but it’s a bit different. Do you think the top bloggers would have such a powerful and well known name if they were on blogspot? John Chow Dot Blogspot just isn’t the same.
Have I convinced you to get your own domain?
If you already have your own domain, why did you decide to get one?
8 Responses to “Top 5 Reasons to Get Your Own Domain Name”
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August 8th, 2007 at 2:49 pm
Ive never not had a domain name, I started blogging 6 years ago the free services available now weren’t available then so I had to my own domain.
August 8th, 2007 at 2:50 pm
are you glad you started out on your own domain?
August 8th, 2007 at 2:55 pm
Definitely - I learnt SO much! Mainly from the hosting aspect though, but I was able to mess around and install scripts etc which was fun without having restrictions on me.
August 8th, 2007 at 4:43 pm
Also, Alexa rankings didn’t use to apply to subdomains (looks like they do now) and Compete rankings still don’t apply to subdomains. If you’re hosted on blogger, you won’t know your real Compete stats.
August 8th, 2007 at 6:12 pm
Alexa rankings are also another benefit. Some .blogspot URL’s don’t even display the alexa.
The benefit as well is that alexa rankings give the rank of the domain, so even if its a subdomain, they get a high alexa rank
August 9th, 2007 at 8:28 am
I started blogging with a free wordpress blog but within 2 days shifted to my own domain as it gives me a much more control over my blog .
August 9th, 2007 at 10:37 am
Glad to see that my “to the point” quotation hit home with you too!
August 17th, 2007 at 3:23 pm
I decided to get my own domain because it’s give me more serious to get blogging and i just love to have my own domain…eventhough i’m still using free webhosting from blogger.com.
I do have plan to buy some webhosting in order to have fully control on my blog , but i still love to used blogger.com . Can’t live without it.