Domain Name or Free Subdomain Name
One of the requirements to be able to start a blog is to have a domain name or a subdomain name. When I started designing websites, I was just riding on other’s domain names. It was fine at first but eventually I realized that having my own domain name is better.
The disadvantage of having my own domain name is I have to invest a small amount of money for it. I have to pay for it every year unlike a subdomain name, for example, at WordPress.com, Multiply.com, Livejournal.com, Tripod.com or Blogger’s Blogspot.com. Subdomain names at these sites are for free.
The problem with having subdomain names at these sites except at Blogger’s Blogspot.com is, advertisements like Google AdSense are not allowed. When I started my blogs, I was not blogging for money but it occurred to me that it was not really a bad idea to earn from my blogs and other websites. I made a little investment of registering several domain names and to offset what I spend for these domain names, I might as well try earning from my blogs and websites.
Why I chose to have my own domain name than just a subdomain name?
One of the reasons among others that triggered me to register my own domain name aside from it became reasonable and affordable was the ranking at Alexa.com of my GeoCities homepages. They were not subdomain names though but it really made me think. I am not really into ranking and statistics but one thing that I observed at Alexa.com was, my Geocities homepages were ranked at Alexa but not really high, instead the site which was really benefiting from it was Yahoo’s GeoCities. It was the same with other sites. I have other homepages with other sites offering free hosting.
I just thought that I worked so hard for my GeoCities homepages that they ranked high at the search engines but it was quite frustrating to see the rank at Alexa.com. It was just because I was availing of the free web hosting of these sites with all the advertisements appearing on my homepages. If I would like to have a higher rank, then I might as well do it with the right domain name, my own domain name.
Where did I register my domain names?
My first choice at that time was Network Solutions but when Namezero.com had a promo, I registered my first domain name with Namezero. Along the way as I was reading about all the issues concerning the high prices of the domain names, GoDaddy.com became like a champion to me when it offered the top level domain names like .com, .net, and .org at a reasonable and affordable price. With GoDaddy.com, I have all the control on my domain name. I do not need to contact any person at the company if I need to change the nameservers and other things related to it.
What is a top-level domain (TLD) or top-level domain name?
According to Wikipedia.org, “A top-level domain (TLD), sometimes referred to as a top-level domain name, is the last part of an Internet domain name, that is, the group of letters that follow the final dot of any domain name.”
In this case, the domain name is ProBlogit.com. The top-level domain name is the “com”. The second-level domain name is “ProBlogit”. If I have mail.problogit.com, then “mail” is the subdomain name. A subdomain is a domain that is part of a larger domain. “ProBlogit” can be referred then as a subdomain of the top-level domain name “com”. But in actual practice, we do not call “ProBlogit” as a subdomain. To add, the www preceding the domain name is a host name of the World Wide Web server.
How much is it to register a domain name?
A domain name would cost at least 10 US dollars or more at GoDaddy.com, sometimes less if there is a promo, depending on what top-level domain name to register.
Why not avail of the free domain name registration offered by web hosting companies?
I thought about that, but as I have said I would like to have all the control on my domain name. If I will not be satisfied with the web host I can just inform the web host that I will not renew the web hosting service with them. I do not have to worry that the web host might not give me the details about my domain name after promoting my domain name to get popular. I can change the nameservers on my own at any time without worry.
Let me tell you though that I have not written about web hosting yet. I will be sharing with you my ideas about it later on. Just to let you know too that there are web hosting companies out there which are willing to host a domain name for free without advertisements but with limited bandwidth and limited disk storage. But I have seen reasonable web hosts where you can even have advertisements like Google AdSense.
What top-level domain name is better? What about choosing a second-level domain name? Should I register two-syllable or three-syllable domain name? What about hyphenated domain names? What about domain name with numbers?
It seems like the questions above are another interesting topics. Allow me to share with you my thoughts about the topics above later on as well. For the meantime, think about choosing between a domain name or a subdomain name. Are you willing to invest in a domain name? Where will you benefit in the next couple of years?
Disclosure:
If you register your domain name at GoDaddy using my referral link, I will earn from it.
[…] Domain Name or Free Subdomain Name. There are advantages and disadvantages of having your own domain name or having a free subdomain name. But if you are serious about your problogging venture, having your own domain name is a better option. […]
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