When you first start out with your website, you might decide to host it on someone else’s domain. For example, you might have a blog on blogspot.com or wordpress.com, or you might host your site on geocities.com, a low-cost Web hosting service provided by Yahoo!.
These hosting services are great if you only want to run your site as a hobby, and don’t care about attracting a lot of visitors or making money. However, if you really want your site to grow, it needs its own domain name. Here’s why:
- It improves the image of your site. Hosting your site on a common domain name, such as blogspot.com or geocities.com, makes your site look — how to put it nicely? — low-budget. People are less likely to trust your site, and you’ll certainly have a hard time selling them anything. A site hosted on its own domain name looks more professional.
- It makes your site more portable. If your site’s hosted on someone else’s domain, you can’t easily move to another hosting company. For example, if you want to move your site off geocities.com, you’re going to lose all the inbound links to your site. (It’s the same problem as having a
'myname@my-isp.com'
email address; if you move ISPs, you lose your email address.) If you have your own domain, however, then you can move your site between different hosting companies while keeping the same domain name and URLs for the site.
In this article you’ll learn how to register and set up your own domain name.