5 Benefits of Owning a Domain Name

by Grace on September 9, 2007

I have just transferred to my own domain and having a lot of thoughts about my big leap. I say big because I have not done this before and although there are lots of forums and information available in the internet, whatever I’ll do with the resources I find is all up to me. If anything works and looks great, good, but if anything goes wrong, I have all myself to blame and fix some codes.

So for me, so far, the 5 Benefits of Owning a Domain Name is as follows:

Customization
Security
Reliability
Email Ownership
Possible Monetizing

CUSTOMIZATION

You will be able to design or make changes to your site so that it stands out in the crowd. You will be able to project your own personality into your site. With hundreds of themes and hundreds of plugins, you can really make the blog your own and essentially, unique.

But don’t look now, I have just migrated to my own domain a few days ago so there’s not much “me” here. However, I shall make it my assignment everyday to make my site better.

SECURITY

By hosting your own blog, you can backup your files and if anything happened, you can just upload them again, with little downtime.

Another benefit of having your own domain name is that it is portable. If you change your internet service provider (ISP), your domain name and your e-mail address goes with you.

RELIABILITY

Domain names show professionalism. Though this is referring to people who are doing business via the internet, I find this pretty logical. Which is more professional, http://www.freewebhost/yourname/yourcompany.html or http://www.yourcompany.com?

I bet you would answer the latter. The reason is that, all the really huge and famous site have their own domain names and there are a lot of junk sites hosted by free website hosting services. Not to discriminate, because there are also great sites on free hosts. But while you can be successful on free sites, you can be more successful on your own site.

EMAIL OWNERSHIP

If you have your own domain name, you can set up an email address with it. For example, yourname@yourcompany.com. You can also set it up in such a way that it forwards the messages you receive to whatever email address you’re currently using, whether it’s GMAIL or Yahoo, whichever you are convenient with and have easy access to.

Another nice thing about having your own domain name is that you can set up lots of email addresses than most free web hosts would permit you to have.

MONETIZING MADE POSSIBLE

… and limitless! Advertising options will not be limited as some free-hosted sites just do not accept them. I am not saying I am going to full-swing on internet marketing or launching a web-based business soon but we’ll never know right? At least when I decide to take that path, I am ready.

There are several articles pointing out that if you are on the web for business, no matter how small a client base you have, or how meager your resources are, two things are a must: a paid server and your own domain name. Again, for reasons of security and reliability and of course, professionalism.

But if you are just hosting a personal page for fun, you can just probably relax and enjoy your site wherever it is now.

When it comes down right to it, the biggest reasons for owning your own domain name is freedom and control. You don’t have someone else telling you can and can’t do with your site.

Don’t get me wrong, if the benefits of having your own domain name don’t sound right to you, then you are probably right. The above list sprung from my own opinion only, applicable in my case.

P.S. One painful case of the pitfalls of blogging in a free host is written here.