With all the free things available on the net, why would you want
to pay for a domain name and hosting to blog or for your website?
Free blogsites or websites are good if you are not into blogging
or writing for business purposes or making money online. Free things do come with a price. The blog site provider
might one day decide to stop providing this service and close it down. This recently happened
to me. Geocities which used to provide websites for free was bought over by yahoo. For a very long
time, they provided this service free of charge. I had three free websites with pretty good
traffic there. Unfortunately, they decided to close down this free service. Ample notice was given
so that we could get our own domain name and hosting. However, this came with a price. Loss of
traffic was the main problem. My consolation was that I already had my existing own domain and hosting
and therefore could redirect some of the traffic to my own domain.
It might also
block your site or take it down for some reasons. What then? Your site disappears
into oblivion, never to be found again. Doesn’t sound good eh? For those who are running
a business, it would be total disaster.
Another reason is, you don’t have total control on the customization of your blogsite/website.
It’s free, so don’t complain. Flexibility is important when you need to control
how you want your site to look like and what you want put into it.
There are many hosting providers out there. However, finding the right one is crucial.
Make sure your hosting provider is reliable. The downtime should there be any must be minimal.
Check to see what kind of services you require. Check out their support system should you
need run into trouble and need assistance. Do not always go for the cheapest available
as they might not be the best.
