Do you really need to have your own domain name?" There are a number of reasons why you should own a domain name :

1) When you have your own domain name, the address of your website will be of the form http://www.yoursite.com. On the other hand, if you put up your site on a free server, the address of your web site will be something like http://www.somefreewebsite.com/yoursite/. Of course, the first looks more professional and is easier to remember.

2) The best 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 an established company, rather than with some fly by night operator.

3) When you have your domain name, you can have multiple emails or multiple aliases of the form alias@yoursite.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@yoursite.com. For questions related to the newsletter that you publish, you can have an email address like editor@yoursite.com. For comments/suggestions about your web site, you can direct your customers to feedback@yoursite.com or webmaster@yoursite.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.).

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 more difficult to rank for your keyword.

5) Because on heavy spamming on some free hostings, some search engines are now refusing to spider some websites which are hosted by the free web hosts.

6) If the address of the web site provided by your free web hosting service is of the form http://www.somefreewebsite.com/yoursite/, (i.e. if your site is placed in a subdirectory of the domain belonging to the free web host) , you cannot create a robots.txt file for your site. This is because the robots.txt file can only be present in the root directory.

7) 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!. Listing your site in directories is difficult enough even when you have your own domain. Don't make your task more difficult than what it needs to be.

8) You should secure the most relevant domain name for your business before it is taken by your competitors. The domain names will help you rank higher in the search engines because of the keywords in each name.

If you do not currently have a domain name, you should be convinced that you need one right now. The small fee that you pay per year for your own domain name is very low compared to the benefits that you get.

 

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