Reasons that make lot of difference between own domain names and free hosting names
If you see two URLs like below-
http://www.bubblesnbath.com/
http://www.hypermart.com/users/bubblesnbath/index.htm
Which one you are more inclined to click on?
Certainly the first one.
Is is not what you sell. When you start. Where your business was focused. You need your own domain name.
***What is a domain name?
Domain name is your website's address. In other words as we can not remember the IP numbers as good as computers, we designed the domain name system. This is to remember the website addresses. We can remember domainname.com easily but not 123.12.123.12.
***How much it costs?
Now the domain registration fee is touching the bottom line. It won't cost you no more than $10 to register a domain for 1 year.
http://www.1afm.com/domain-names/ :$8.95 per year
http://www.dnbuy.com/ :$8.97 per year
http://www.namepile.com/ :$9.95 per year
http://registerfly.com/ :$9.99 per year
***Why you need your own domain?
1. Your own domain gives your business credibility. People see you as a reliable person.
They will know that you are doing business seriously. And your own domain gives you a professional credit. More likely you are going to make sales with your own domain rather than free hosting names.
2. It will be simple to remember the first URL (http://www.bubblesnbath.com/) in the above example than the second one (http://www.hypermart.com/users/bubblesnbath/index.htm).
3. You can brand yourself and your business in peoples eyes.
4. You can get a specific email address that belongs to you and your domain. Not like you@yahoo.com or you@hotmail.com.
5. Suppose you have a website like-
http://www.freespaceproviders.com/users/bubblesnbath/index.htm
You spend all your time to promote this URL and to sell your products. If suddenly your free hosting provider will tell you that they are closing free accounts. Or you are facing problems with running your free site.
If you change your servers now, all the time you spent to promote the above URL will become waste. You have to start over again. You will lose traffic.
But with your own domain, when ever you change the hosts, the URL will be the same and you don't lose traffic when you change your hosts.
6. It was said that search engines give less preference to free server names and they don't crawl beyond index page. (This was the discussion I read in the Google public forums)
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