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.yourcompany.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@yourcompany.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@yourcompany.com.
For questions related to the newsletter that you publish, you
can have an email address like editor@yourcompany.com. For
comments/suggestions about your web site, you can direct your
customers to feedback@yourcompany.com or
webmaster@yourcompany.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 hosted by 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. 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 at
http://www.1stSearchRanking.com/t.cgi?3455_c&webhosting/
About the author:
Article by Sumantra Roy. Sumantra is one of the most respected
search engine positioning specialists on the Internet. To have
Sumantra's company place your site at the top of the search
engines, go to http://www.1stSearchRanking.com/t.cgi?3455_c For
more advice on how you can take your web site to the top of the
search engines, subscribe to his FREE newsletter by going to
http://www.1stSearchRanking.com/t.cgi?3455_c&newsletter.htm