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While there are many solutions available for finding web hosting for a personal website, there is one that stands head and shoulders above the rest. Let’s take a quick look at many of the ways you can host a site of your own, and why one of these ways is far superior to the rest.
Having a website of your own, either for your own personal use for family and friends, or to use in branding yourself and possibly your business, is becoming more and more the standard operating procedure these days. Many people try and get their own names in the domain, such as sallysmith.com, or at least get as close as they can in the event that their name is already taken.
Once you’ve decided how to present yourself to the World Wide Web, you are faced with the choice of where to host your new site. You can opt for a free hosting option on some of the more popular sites out there created for the purpose of hosting sites for people, such as Blogger, Wordpress.com, Vox, Weebly, Multiply, and a gang of others. These are very easy to create, and some of them even offer the ability to incorporate your own domain. Others simply have you as a subdomain of their site, such as sallysmith.weebly.com.
The advantages of hosting on sites like these are ease of use, near instant publishing of your site, as well as many features that you would be hard pressed to come up with on your own, such as incorporating videos, images and audio into your site. Some of the major disadvantages are the fact that very often you will have to put up with advertising on your page that you don’t benefit from or control. This is part of the price for free hosting. Also, you have no ultimate control over the site itself. If the hosting provider decides it doesn’t like your content, that you use too much bandwidth, or they even go out of business, you are pretty much out of luck, with little to no recourse. This is not good!
The best solution for hosting your own personal website is to set up web hosting of your own. It is very inexpensive, and the time it takes to learn how to do some of the basic technical things associated with hosting your own site should not put you off. It’s a little like getting new cell phone, and having to learn all the things you need to do to make sure it works the way you want to. You can also get tech help from the web host to help you if you’re really stumped.
The advantages of doing it this way are many. First off, you control what goes on your site, and no one has a say but you. You control any ads that are there, and you can profit from them. You can employ aggressive search engine marketing campaigns to build inbound links and get your site ranked well in the search engines, and thus be found more easily.
Decent web hosting starts at around $5 a month and it will have far more features than you will probably ever use. It’s definitely worth considering.
While free web hosting on the various Web 2.0 platforms looks great, and definitely has its uses, hosting your own site on your own web hosting account is by far the best way to go.
