So you want to expand your business to a greater than a local area!!!!Or you are a fabulous writer; you love writing and want to share your experience with the rest of the world. The best and the simple way to both the above scenario are to create a website. Well, the first and foremost advantage of a website is that it give you a worldwide presence, you need not hover over from places to places to propagate your talent/business. All you need to do is to sit at one place, have an internet connection and a website and the whole world will know about it.
Lets begin. You have an idea and you want to create a website. So what’s next????
Basically for creating a website you have to undergo the following steps:
1) Think about a domain name and register yourself.
2) Find a hosting provider where you can host your website.
3) Design your website with the word press themes or any of the site building softwares. You may add your own CSS or HTML styles. There are other softwares available too as per the requirement of your website.
4) Publish your website.
Also read: Earn online through your website/blog
However simple these steps may seem to be, creating a website is not that an easy process? You have to conduct your own research to get the website of your desired choice.
With the internet flooding with free hosting services, you might be confused as why pay for a website when you can build it all for free. And the good part is that most of these provides provide an inbuilt templates so you need not worry about designing thing and bravo you build a website in a span of 10 minutes.
Yes all the stated above mentioned points about free website is all true. But to give a clear picture let me differentiate as how creating a free website and a paid website would matter in the long run.
Create a free website
So you plan of creating a website without investing a single penny. A good and economical thought!!! All you have to do is :
1) register yourself with an email id
2) think of a domain name
3) create your account and choose a template from the inbuilt templates
4) post all your contents into your site
5) Publish it.
Your job is done now. On an average it will not take much of your time and you are already there with your first website. But alas!!! What you see is that the name of your website is not all that you have given. A sub- domain is attached to it. And the bad part of a free site begins from here.
More than you, your host provider is popularized because people will often tend to remember you not by your domain name but by your sub domain name. And halt, it is not only you; there would be thousands like you who would be registering for the same free service. After all, people like all that which is given free. You might have provided a very good content for your site but there are thousand sitting idle and not doing anything, so your image may be affected because even those people had the same sub- domain as you posses. All your hard work would go in vain and you might not be getting a better presence as you deserved.
The only advantage of a free website is that you get it all for free but then there are so many disadvantages that the free scheme would not seem as lucrative as It was supposes to be.
Disadvantages of opting for a free website
Some of the few disadvantages of free web hosting are illustrated as below:
The sub-domain always remains attached to your website name which looks a bit unprofessional. You are not provided with your individual domain name and your url will always contain the name of the host provider.
1) There is no FTP access.
2) You are not able to use the interactive features like forums, chat rooms, shopping cart, etc.
3) Your site ranking may be affected.
4) You site might be suspended at anytime as the host provider may change their terms of agreement at any point of time.
5) No unique email addresses.
6) Limited disk space and bandwidth
7) No customer support provided and you may most likely to have more downtime than uptime.
8) Your host provider might flood your website with pop up ads and you might not be able to do anything about it.
Create a website where you own the domain and host
Lets now begin creating a website where you actually pay for your services.
The process for a paid service goes the same way except for a few changes;
1) You register a domain name for your website for a period of around 1 year, 2 years or 3 years as according to your choice and pay for each year.
2) You search for a good host provider, subscribe for their plan on a monthly and yearly basis and pay for it.
3) you plan about the design of your website, work on it , do some research and finally you reach a state where you can publish it.
4) At, last you publish your website.
This seems a bit too tedious task and that too when you have to pay for the services. But not to worry all your hard work would pay up gradually with time. You should always learn to sow before you reap and sow with all your dedication so that what you reap is all cherishing.
So you have put in all your money to create a website so what is that you get in return. First let me emphasize that the website will be all your own. You would be reining it all over. From choosing your domain name to how it should look, you will be the sole one to decide it. How your website performs would spread a brand name for you and not your host provider.
Advantages of having your own domain and host
To put it all, let me illustrate some of the advantages of using a paid website:
1) You get a domain name of exactly what you choose and you don’t have to share it with some host provider.
2) You can build your site as per your own choice with interactive features as forums, chat rooms, etc to have a wider web presence.
3) You get ample disk space and bandwidth.
4) You have your own unique email id through which the visitors may contact you.
5) You can run your website as per your choice and as long as you want, nobody can terminate it except you.
6) You configure how the ads and pop-ups will be displayed on your website.
7) Your website is likely to have maximum uptime. Whenever you have a downtime or some technical glitches in your website, there would be dedicated technical support from the host provider to take care of it.
With so many advantages, going for a paid website would not seem to be such an expensive thing. Now- a –days the web hosting are provided with an affordable price and more facilities.
So, if you are serious about making a web presence, do opt for paid services. However, if you are a newbie who would just like to explore the web, learn and maintain his/her logs through blogging go ahead and opt for a free website. Whatever be the thing, the choice is all yours.