Blog Case Study: Domain and Hosting

Before you say, Why am I talking about the most boring topic when it comes to getting a new blog set up? It is because so many people prefer to use a free service rather than spend a few dollars to get themselves set up on their own private domain.

Why Using Free Services Is Not Good For Monetization...

Unless you want to hand your life over to Google, who really don't care about you, by all means go ahead and set yourself up at blogger.com. What really irks me is that they redirect all blogs to xyz.blogspot.com - Why you do not get a xyz.blogger.com subdomain is beyond me?

When you aim to monetize your blog with a free service it is usually not the safest way to go. Here's some reasons why -

• You never know when your blog may get deleted by Google {or WordPress}
• Advertisers generally don't feel too good about advertising on a free hosted website
• It doesn't help in branding you the right way
• You can't monetize it as much as you could
• You don't "own" your own blog

The same reasons also apply to the free hosted service available from WordPress.com - It's worse with them actually, as you really can't install anything on your blog. Like all these juicy wordpress plugins.

...Or Starting Out

If you are probably saying to yourself, - Well I'm just going to use a free service till I get to know everything there is to know about blogging and then shift over when I'm comfortable. BIG MISTAKE!

You will probably learn 10 times as much being self-hosted than if you were not. Plus the amount of time you spend making your blog look like the way you want it too, writing all your content, optimizing it for search engines etc...would be probably be best spent doing it on space you actually own. Which is your own domain name and hosting!

And yes, I plan to monetize my new blog from the beginning. More on that later.

The Case Study Moves Forward

Launching this new blog and getting 100 RSS readers in a month is definitely going to be a challenge, as I've picked the month of February to do so. The shortest month of the year.

Also, I'm not going to be advertising the blogs URL over here. Instead I will be reading over quite a few of my own tips and see how well they do for me.

So far I've spent $8.57 for 1 year of domain registration and 2 months of hosting. See how cheap it is! Which leaves me with $91.43 for advertising and anything else related to getting the blog on its feet.

More updates to come soon...

Related posts:

1. New Blog Case Study: Getting Started
2. News From My Inbox – TapeFailure, Spotback and Win a Domain
3. Dedicated Hosting – Just in case you get dugg
4. Host208 – New Host on The Block
5. Need Free Web Hosting? – Easy CGI Has Got It