Getting a domain name a paid hosting is the first and most important step that you’ll take while you start a website. In my opinion, a site is completely not yours unless you have total control and have domain name and a good host for it.
If traffic and popularity is all you care, then it’s ok to have Blogspot, Wordpress or a typepad hosted blog. If you want to go a step ahead (earn money, have authority, strong online presence, etc..), then the first best decision that you take is going for a paid hosting and a domain name for it. To start with you can get yourself a 25/50 MB web space (around 2-4 GB monthly BW) and a domain name registered for an year.
Paid Hosting:
Going for paid hosting has many advantages. The uptime of your site is high, your web pages load faster, your host will take back up regularly, etc..
Tips to choose good web host: Web Hosting is a very lucrative way to earn online. So never get duped. Never ever go for free hosting. Either you’ll have forced Ads (or have your Ads), or you need to spam their forums, use paid softwares (like vBulletin) or they lack key features (which you might not be aware of as a newbie), etc.. they person is not doing a charity by giving you free space. He’s here to earn money. He’ll make quick bucks and close the service, leaving you
Now consider this: 1 GB web space, unlimited Bandwidth and all the other jazz for less than $15 a year. Looks too good? Yes, it’s tempting as well. Those web hosts are inflating the space and bandwidth assuming that average user does not use this much space and bandwidth. Take this blog for example. On an average I post somewhere around 15 posts a month. In some 10 months period, it took me only 22 MB space. So why do you need 500 MB or 1 GB space? Don’t get carried away by such claims, they have riders in their TOS for “abuse” of traffic and/or space.
Domain name:
A reality check:
1. How is bestgadgets.com
2. How is bestgadgets.blogspot.com
If I’m the visitor, I’ll think bestgadgets.com is maintained and run by some pro and geek even though it might be run by nOObs.
For less than $5/year, we get some reliable service to register a domain. You have no excuse not to have a domain if you are financially challenged. You should never fall for a free domain, unless you have complete control over it (which for 90% you won’t have). You should be able to change DNS or transfer to any other registrar at your will. After all your sites are known by the domain name and not the IP of your hosting server! There are a lot of reasons why you need to get yourself a domain name..which I have discussed in the following section.
13 Reasons why you should get yourself a paid hosting and a domain name
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1. Tens of thousands of domain names are registered every day. At the time of writing this article, 536,339 domains (463,378 .com domains) were registered in the last 24 hours.
So why do you want to wait for a auspicious date or wait for your first AdSense payment (I know many people do this mistake plus the first $100 is the most difficult target for 80% of the publishers)? At last when you decide to register a domain, your preferred domain in all probability would have been taken already.
2. You don’t need to be a AdSense guru or a super affiliate to make money online. I made more money blogging (this site) than I spend for hosting and a domain name. Even if you don’t make ‘big money’, AdSense (in all probability) will pay for your hosting and domain expenses.
3. Why waste your time posting in forums (and if you’re really not interested) when you can concentrate your time and effort for your site?
4. A domain name will give your site a pro look.
5. You can have email ID which will have your name or your company’s name in it. Like yourname@yourname.com or yourname@yourcompanyname.com , etc..
6. Get a domain name of your choice NOW! Already .com names are saturated. Then you’ll have hyphens, numbers and combination of them and your domain name will look like a password!
7. All most of affiliate networks, contextual programs require your own Domain name.
8. It’s cheap and affordable. You can register a .com for less than $3.
9. If you wish to earn money with your sites, and you get a site/blog hosted by a 3rd party company, then by my experience you won’t earn much money. Merely earning won’t do. You need to have some threshold before you get really paid.
Even if someone makes money with sites hosted by a 3rd party sites, then he/she has the potential to make atleast 20-25% more money.
10. Eventually if you go for a paid hosting at a later stage, and if you export contents from your old site to your new site, the Search Engines (SEs) will smell duplicate content and they’ll penalize your site. This happened to this site also.
11. When you register your name for a long period of time, then Search Engines (SEs) like Google, Yahoo indicate that they look at length of domain registration when ranking a domain. I’m going to register my domain for 2 years this time around when this current one year period expires.
12. Even if you argue that the above point is irrelevant, domain registration weighting is that it’s related to the length of time that a domain has been established for rather than when it’s set to expire next. So why do you want to wait or continue with a free free site rather than having total control? Plus if you notice, all the PR 10 (and even PR 9) sites have been around over over 10 years. So Google definitely look how long the site is online.
13. In case you have paid for the hosting and the domain, then you won’t want to ‘waste’ the money and you’ll want to work on your (upcoming) site. This factor works like a charm on us.
In fact there are even more reasons why you should go for a paid hosting and a domain name like you can sell your domain for a higher price if it happens to be a good one (Generic, typo of a popular domain, etc..) and after some time if you don’t have time, you can park your domain and earn money. Ganesh.com was auctioned for a amount starting from Rs 12 lacs at eBay. Business.com was sold for $12 million. So you can see the importance.
Domain names are your Online Identity. You should register a domain under your name and/or your company’s name. You have enough reasons why you need to get a domain name now. So what are you waiting for? Register a domain and get a paid hosting now!
[tags]domain, domains, domain name,domain names, hosting, paid hosting, earning online, earn online, web space[/tags]
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21 comments ↓
Very true mate , agree with you .
well ok a domain name is good choice but starters can do with free hosts like zeeblo also
Zeeblo sucks man. I’m sure it won’t have uptime of more than 99%. Plus have you seen pages hosted on Zeeblo? They load very slow.
Why take chances? Go for paid hosting. You’ll never regret. I made more than 17 times more money that I paid for my hosting and domain and still one year is not yet over.
well thats a good news that u made some money:),well still u can tell how much did u earn in a montly apart from ur pocketmoney and how many hrs do u devote to ur blog?
Hmm… Devoting time to blog depends on my motivation to work on it. sometimes I work my ass off. Sometimes for 2-3 days also I’ll not be thinking of it..
Again earning depends. The good news is that the traffic has improved and earnings are increasing every month. I make $60 a month on an average now. But in July, I made $148, so it depends. I made more than $450 now and paid Rs 1350 for hosting and domain. I’m sure I’ll make around $800-900 by the end of this year. So you can see the amount that I spend (invested) and the amount that I earned. As you see, this is nothing compared to what others earn but still I’m happy. Gosh.. this is the first time I’ve revealed my earnings!!!
Gosh, u made that much , I need my share for spaming in your blog ,Lol.
I made 0.13 $ till date , hope I too get something like you earning 1 day.
& about ganesh.com auction ,I wrote about it on my blog.
I agree with all of your points, today I booked another domain for 2 years. And one of my domain is booked for 2011. No serious business can be built on free things. With domains and space has become so cheap I don’t know why people go for free hosting and free domains. I can’t think of optimizing domain which is not mine.
Yeah.. and the popular saying: “You need to spend money to earn money”.
I have spent only 1000rs for my differnet sites from my pocket money. And now my net profit a month is abt 10k. its really a profitable business.
Most of all, we get the freedom to do anything !!!
I didn’t pay even a single paisa… just bought domain and hosting via paypal
I work as a freelancer to accumalate funds in my paypal account..
^^
I din’t understand what you mean by “freelancer to accumalate funds in my paypal account”.
Maybe you should teach us how to collect funds.
hey ashwin.. thanks a ton for the wonderful info… am really encouraged to go ahead with my blog which i was pulling half-heartedly…
good going dude…
~rohan
Good luck Rohan!
Good post Ashwin!
I have been telling these things to people since pretty long time in forums. But do they listen?
Let me not name him, but there’s a techie who has lost the domain name of his choice by 2 days! Yes, just 2 days! And he has still not registered any domain name!! He is a friend and I was willing to provide free hosting to him. But still he didn’t want to spend on domain name
IMO, free hosting (like zeeblo) is still ok. You can live with it. But people falling for a free domain trick are down-right ignorants! Even some cheap domain registrations are best avoided. You must see whether you get control or not.
In the last one month, I have helped 4 different people regain control over their domain names. Their service provider refused to give them any password to control the domain name. Without control over your domain name, you are stuck with the same service provider for domain and hosting and therefore in short, your whole site is at someone’s mercy!
Ashish -
But I don’t agree on the free hosting like Zeeblo. Most of the sites hosted by them sucks. I’m sure the uptime will not be more than 97-97.5%. Plus the loading takes a lot of time. You won’t feel like browsing for more than 10 seconds.
[...] Many visitors who have visited say the article was great, informative, good going, etc.. but all this 9 months none of them have said I write well. Why? Simple - I don’t write that well. What I mean by writing well is like those who write novels, use flowery language and newspaper like articles. But check some of the movie reviews that I have written, they’re really well written ; and see article like this one: Importance of Paid Hosting and Domain name, I had one person and 3-4 people emailing me that it was inspirational. How would have that been possible? Because I did what I always enjoy doing. [...]
Ashwin, there are so many people who can’t afford to pay for hosting. They can live with slow speeds and occassional downtimes. So for them something like zeeblo is ok. Actually for these type of people that I had offerred free hosting in forums.
But there are people who pay for hosting and take a domain free
They don’t realise the trap! And still there are so many people using free domains like co.nr .or .tk. They don’t realise that their visitors, goodwill, etc. is all on domain name!
[...] The second thing is never wait for things to happen. I know a lot of bloggers having so much potential and talent wasting away by not having a paid hosting and web domain. They wait for their first pay-check to get paid hosting. I also did the same thing. I transferred the posts from my old blog to this place. Google found out duplicate content and this blog was penalized. I lost traffic because of that. Traffic is everything in online success. It’s so difficult to pull up the audience and make them engaged to your show. You need to be proactive. Register a domain and get a paid hosting now! More Read: Importance of Paid Hosting and Domain name [...]
I never thought about this and it’s really surprising that you can earn so much just by your blog. I’ve started my blog, but I really didn’t know what to write. I’m taking a look around many blogs. Few inspire me, most don’t. Yours is really very good. It’s simple, to the point and nothing extravagant. A good blend of personal and tech stuff. That’s what I’ll be doing too. After reading numerous posts, you have definitely perked my interest in watching more movies
I used to get to watch a lot of movies around 6 months before, thanks to my friend, who downloads movies like crazy! Now, everyone is busy. I’ll definitely try to write good articles for my blog and in case I start earning, I’ll use that to get my unlimited broadband connection 
^^
Thanks a lot for the compliment.
That’s what many people say.
You’re making a mistake. First get the UL connection and then you make thousands of Rupees.
UL connection is not a possibility in my case, atleast for now. But, I’ll still continue writing. Waiting for the exams to get over
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