I’m coming to the point in my blogging and online marketing where I need to decide if it’s time to buy domains and pay for hosting my blogs.
My goal is to keep all this as inexpensive as possible until it starts making enough money to pay for costs like this. But I could also be losing profits by not going on to the inexpensive paid services that might really boost my earnings. Those paid services are owning my domain names, paying for hosting and having a good autoresponder.
Advantages:
- The whole Tumblrgate thing can’t happen to you if you own your domains and pay for hosting. You won’t go to your blog account one day to find you can’t log in and retrieve your content. Not owning your domain can mean you have to learn to do back-ups from your blog on a public blogging site. This isn’t always an easy and straightforward thing to do.
- Wordpress makes a lot of free templates to use to make designing your own blogging site easy. There are also several other free templates available. Just search for them.
- You’re not constrained by the Terms of Service of blogging sites - which you should read carefully before committing your hard work to any of them.
- Better profits are more likely.
Disadvantages:
- It’s no longer free.
- It costs money to register each domain. If you only have one blog, this isn’t prohibitively expensive. But if you have several, the registration costs can get rather high if you register all of your sites at once. Still, at around $15 per year per domain name, it’s really not that expensive. A solution to the cost issue is to register a couple of domains a month so all your costs don’t come due at the same time each year. Most of us can squeeze $30 from somewhere no matter how tight our budget, especially if that $30/year is making you around $600/month.
- After you pay for domain name registration, you have to pay for hosting. Again, hosting can be as inexpensive as $8/month for an unlimited number of sites. Hostgator is one such service provider.
- But, this just took your free blog to a minimum cost of $111/year for one blog. The more blogs you have, the less the hosting costs, but you still have to pay the domain name registration fee each year.
- I could be losing money by not paying for these services.
If you have 7 blogs you want to own and host yourself, it would cost a total of $201/year. That’s not bad at all, but it’s still not free. If you added aweber to the mix, it would cost you an additional $179.40/year for a total cost of $380.40/year. That breaks down to $31.70/month for 7 sites.
I’m to the point where I have to weigh the costs against the probability of losing my content. I’ve spent months on it now, and if I lost it, I’d lose a lot of hard work and time. I seriously doubt I’d be able to recreate it in a reasonable amount of time, even if I had everything backed up. For me, it would be so discouraging to lose so much hard work. Tumblrgate really bummed me out and I’d only put two blogs on it for a few days. I can’t imagine that happening now.
So, looking at it that way, I guess I just made my decision to start buying my domain names and transferring my blogs to paid hosting.
Off to the budget to see where I can squeeze out some money…
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