1) When you have your own domain name, your website’s address will be something like www.yourcompany.com. If you put your site on one of the free hosting services instead, your address will be something like www.somefreewebsite.com/yoursite/. Which of these sounds more professional? Which is shorter and easier to remember? I’ll leave you to judge.
2) The only 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 a large, established company, rather than with some fly by night operator.
3) When you have your own domain name, you can have multiple email addresses of the form [email protected]. This lets you assign different addresses to different functions, all delivered to your actual inbox. For example, for questions about the products and services you sell, you can have an address like [email protected]. For questions about your newsletter, you can use [email protected], and for comments and suggestions about your website, you can direct customers to [email protected] or [email protected]. Having different addresses for different functions not only makes it easier to sort your email, but also gives customers the impression that yours is a large, established company that is safe to do business with.
4) A website on its own domain builds up its own reputation with search engines over time. When you use a free hosting service, your site is just one folder or subdomain on someone else’s domain, alongside thousands of other sites, many of them low quality or spam. That makes it much harder to rank well for competitive keywords. Just think of the traffic you would lose.
5) With your own domain, you are always in control. If you ever change web hosts, you simply point your domain to the new host and your address, links and search rankings stay the same. If a free host changes its rules or closes down, your website’s address disappears with it.
If you don’t have a domain name yet, are you convinced you need one right now? The small yearly fee for your own domain name is peanuts compared to the benefits you get. Many web hosts even include a free domain for the first year.