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There are two options you can choose to give yourself an identity over the web . You can have a free domain name that usually comes with free hosting, or your own domain name hosted in your own hosting account which will cost you domain registration and hosting service fees. In this article, I would like to present you the reasons to have your own domain and host your own content.

Investing in your own domain name and hosting account grant you these advantages:

more impression on your credibility, professionalism and how serious you are with your business

I consent that whether you can afford a domain name or not isn’t supposed to be the factor to determine those three. However, if you’re new to the internet business or blogging in particular and you know you have a decent writing talent, you need to demonstrate your skill on your own domain name instead of a blogspot or wordpress.com blogs.

I’m not declaring against blogspot or wordpress.com blogs but supposedly there are two newcomers (Hank and Jack) who nobody has ever heard of them, who both can produce top-notch articles and one of them is using hank.com and the other one is jack.blogspot.com. Ask yourself, all the information you got were just those two domain names , which one you’ll click first? ….Why? Self hosted domains give higher impressions and for some people, it shows that you really mean business by having something invested.

you own your content, your links, your community and your rank

With blogging platforms like wordpress.com or blogspot, you don’t have control over your article database. If somehow you managed to build a profile under your free hosted domain and produce some income, anytime if the domain owner assumes that your blog content is inappropriate or unsuitable with their purpose, they can remove your content anytime.

Even if they allow you to submit a reconsideration, it will take time and there’s always a chance it will be gone forever. By the time your blog is vanished, there goes also your content, community and hard earned rank. You can start working on it again, of course. But why don’t you do it now? If you’re not hosting your own content right now, prioritize to have your own domain, readership and rankings ahead.

Another good reason to move to self hosting your blog is you can keep your PageRank when you move hosting accounts. When you transfer from free hosted blog platform to self hosted, your PageRank stays in your old free hosted platform and it takes a considerable time to flow the rank to your new domain. And not always goes as planned, though. So if you believe that you’ll have a good position in the search engine for your keyword target (and you should), start hunting a domain name and budget yourself to get a hosting account in the coming days.

people find you easier

You have a handful of quality articles about culinary at borntocook.wordpress.com and your competitor only presents a list of grass and seeds, how to stir them in a cup of milk and a bucket load of cooking affiliate links in borntocook.com. When people visit your site, most of the time they’ll remember your site as borntocook.com leaving "wordpress.com" unregistered on their memory bank.

The next time they look for another cooking tip, they’ll find themselves digging "spammy" affiliate links in borntocook.com just because they didn’t record the rest of the URL before. The visitors may left your competitors’ website for good, but you don’t have them either.

a life saver in crisis

I don’t wish this to happen, but if things get difficult in the future, you can sell your ranked domain for some financial boost. Sure you can also do this with your geocities website, but the price will be much less.

be ahead of your competitor

If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance that someone somewhere in the globe is too, or was. If someone was, he/she maybe looking for a domain name left right now. And if this doesn’t wake you up, it’ll cost your time and probably cash double to look for another domain name that hasn’t been registered to. Start your research now. The links below will assist you in your hunt for your online identity.

Why wouldn’t people do this?

It’s unusual to provide 2 opposing opinions against each other, but here are the rationals people often put forward to backup their actions of not hosting their own online identity. Compare them with the arguments above, consider carefully which one benefits you more and make your best decision:

• it costs too much , there’s less risk where no money is involved with free hosted blogs - it’s true. however, you’re not saving more by handling your own asset under someone else’s control. You get what you pay for. Anything like your site/blog suddenly dissapear overnight can happen anytime. In order to advance, most of the time you should choose power over budget.
• blogspot blogs can get indexed faster - yes, they can. But, how important is your story being indexed in less than 24 hours, people link to it, you’re overflowed with comments but you never actually own them all compared to it takes a bit more time to get listed, but all the good things above happen exactly the same and all of those are really in your grasp?
• blogspot blogs gets higher position in SERP - sadly, it’s not true. They may get indexed faster, but it seems no priority on the listing.
• free hosted blogs are easy to use - and usually performs poor in SEO compared to self hosted blogs where customization is borderless or at least there are more to tweak than free hosted blogs. If you’re planning to move forward the path of online opportunities, you need to switch to a better performing wagon.
• there’s no need to understand html codes - and you’ll have limitations on how you can actually expand your blog’s reach. Like the argument above, self hosted blogs are tailored to surpass free hosted blogs in actions of customization which results for better SEO for higher search engine results placement.

With those said, how do you represent your online presence now? Do you stick to free hosted domain names or do you have your own domain? What made you decide to have your own domain name?

Below are the links you can read to assist your steps further:

How to Choose the Right Domain Name for Your Business

200 Prefixes and Suffixes for Domain Names

The Best Free Blogging Software - download WordPress

Here’s where I host my blogs. They have the best price and service up to today.

Here is where I purchase my domain names.

Another thoughts comparing self and free hosted blogs and in what situation a free hosted blog platform fits better:

Niche Blog Hosting: WordPress vs. Blogger

Google Blogger vs. WordPress, Blog Wars Part 2: The Result

Is Blogger Really That Bad?