Why You Need Your Own Host NOW

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Free hosting sites are perfect for new bloggers who often aren’t ready to make a financial commitment to blogging until they gain more confidence. With WordPress.com or Blogger, you can sign up and start blogging in a matter of minutes without having to learn about things like FTP programs, MySQL database setup or configuration file editing.

There’s only so far that someone interested in making money blogging can go with a free hosting service. Eventually there comes a point when it’s time to get your own domain and find a good, affordable host for it.

But how do you know when you’re ready?

You are ready to make more money blogging.

Paid blogging opportunities frequently exclude blogs on free sites like Blogger, WordPress.com, LiveJournal, MySpace, Xanga, etc. Why? There are a variety of reasons but they all boil down to the fact that free sites do not get advertisers the same amount of exposure or high placement in search engine results that self-hosted domains deliver. As long as your blog remains on a free site to save yourself money, you are limiting the amount of money you can make with your blog.

You are committed to updating your blog regularly.

New bloggers often over-analyze their own writing, sabotaging their own ability to blog by wondering “is this worth blogging about?” As a result, their blogs are sporadically updated based on when they’re in the mood to blog and feel like what they have to write about is Important. Unfortunately, that attitude becomes part of a self-defeating cycle. As long as a new blog is infrequently updated it’s not going to get a significant amount of traffic, which usually frustrates new bloggers so they blog less. See the problem?

When you’ve grown comfortable blogging daily — whether that’s once or several times per day — regardless of your mood and without feeling like you have to produce The Great American Blog Entry each and every time, you’ll find that traffic increases as well. People know they can find something fresh to read on your site so they visit more often, leaving more comments and linking your site more often. Once that occurs, you’ll actually find you’ve got a lot more to blog about.

You want more traffic.

Back in the days when blogging first began to gain popularity, free sites like Blogger (formerly known as BlogSpot prior to Google’s acquisition) were notorious for slow-loading pages and broken permalinks. Even today, Blogger regularly has service disruptions that turn off many potential readers, and RSS-reliant users find themselves ignoring Blogger sites because they don’t offer feeds by default.

Self-hosting won’t necessarily prevent slow-loading pages. You’ll have to optimize your site to make that happen. They do, however, tend to have fewer unannounced service disruptions and every major blogging platform available for self-hosted sites automatically creates RSS feeds. Both of those go a long way to bringing new readers and turning first-time visitors into regular traffic.

You want to look more professional.

Having your website at a free hosted site is a lot like renting an apartment: sure, you’ve got a place and you’re in charge of it for the time being, but it’s not really yours. A web address of janedoe.freehostingsite.com says that you’re not really the master of your domain. In fact, you don’t even have a domain at all! (Granted, some free sites allow you to use your own domain but they do still impose restrictions on how you can configure your blog.

Many times bloggers sign up with free services and choose the first subdomain that came to mind, only to realize later that something like fuzzylittlehappypuppy.freehostingsite.com doesn’t quite convey the professional image they need to turn blogging into a reliable source of income. Buying your own domain and moving to a paid host allows you to fix that.

You want control of your content.

The terms of service at free sites prohibits certain types of content and encourages readers to “flag” sites that violate those limits. But oh, you say, you would never publish something hateful, racist or otherwise offensive to readers so you don’t need to worry.

Actually, you do. Because the internet is such a vast place it naturally contains an abundance of malicious people, people who “flag” other sites for violations that don’t exist because they want to shut down competitors, or because they consider your sponsored entries to be spam, or even simply for the fun of it.

If your site gets flagged, you’ll be prohibited from updating your blog (regardless of whether you have deadlines approaching) for however long it takes the free hosting company to review your content and determine whether you actually violated their TOS or not. Those days can mean lost opportunities, lost income and lost prestige for the blogger.

You want more options.

Free hosted sites limit your ability to use plugins, those nifty little bits of programming that add professional bells and whistles to your blog. Want to show off who’s been linking your entries directly beneath each on the front page? You can’t do that with some free hosting sites. Is too much comment spam getting through on our blog? Your defenses are limited when you rely on free hosting, which means you either have to put up with it or move to moderated comments — something that definitely turns off many blog readers.

The more popular your blog gets, the more you might find yourself needing more than one email address. Many bloggers prefer using one email address for personal correspondence, another for blog comments and a third as a contact for companies for which they do paid blogging. With a free site, you’re limited to one email address for everything. Move to your own host and you’ll find you can have as many email addresses as you like.

You are ready to learn more.

The great thing about free hosting is how few computer skills a person must have to set up their own blog. You don’t have to know HTML. You don’t need to know CSS. You don’t need to know how to edit META tags or optimize your page titles for SEO purposes. You sign up, you answer a few questions, and you’re ready to blog.

Moving to your own host definitely does involve a learning curve, one that’s steep for those who are afraid of computers or somehow making a mistake that will bring the whole internet crashing down. (Don’t worry, you’re not likely to do that.) When you’ve reached the point where you are comfortable finding things to write about and doing so regularly, regardless of your mood, and you’re doing it well but want more exposure for it, then you’re probably ready to apply yourself and learn how to make that kind of exposure and traffic happen.

Getting your own domain and finding an affordable, professional host takes time. Moving your data takes time. Setting up your software, installing a great design and tweaking it until it’s just so all take time. If you aren’t committed to blogging regularly, or you’re not ready to take your blog earnings to the next level, stay where you are. Keep practicing and you may just find that your traffic goes up to the point where you do feel ready to go through the time and effort involved in switching to your own host.

Once you’ve made that move, though, you’ll find that the effort and expense are both worth it and you’ll wonder why it took you so long to make the switch.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 8th, 2008 at 9:46 am and is filed under Starting a blog (Blogging 101). Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Tagged in: amount of traffic | blog entry | bloggers | host | hosting | making money | updating your blog

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