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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? hich 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/
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