Hey, I want to start a new blog, but I don't have the $50 for cheap hosting at the moment. Could I just buy a domain, and host it on blogger, or will I be paying for it in the long run? I've heard that paying for hosting and running your own blog is better than running a free host like blogger. Is this just because of the flexibility you have on your own site, or do search engines actually prefer a site with private hosting? If they do, how significantly weighted is it? Thanks!
Here are a couple of my responses to similar posts yesterday: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?p=12461478&highlight=free+host#post12461478 http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?p=12460387&highlight=free+host#post12460387 Should give you an idea of how I feel about Blogspot, WordPress.com, and other "free" hosting.
There is no thing that if u host ur own site with comparing to hosting with free service like blogger will make ur site high in search engine You can use the free host without any tension. Thanks and Regards Nirmal Varma
Hi, It won't cost $50 for hosting, however I'm not sure if you mean monthly or annually if you mean monthly you could get it for under $10. Yes, I think you can add a domain to your Blogger, check http://www.google.com/support/blogger/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55373 which shows how to do so. You won't be having to pay anything else if you decide to add your domain to Blogger, other than your domain. However if your planning to go big time with your blog I recommend you buy your own domain, unique IP, good hosting company and use WordPress.
So, just to clarify - although search engines don't favor one or the other, you should start with a paid hosting domain if you're thinking anything long term. Canonical, thanks for the links to those posts. That makes a lot of sense. Thanks again, fellas.
Hey Monkey, The $50 I was referring to was in reference to ~$4/month that Godaddy charges for economic plans. I've purchased hosting a couple times in the past, and have just paid the ~$50 up front. If I go this route, I'll probably use Joomla, as I'm very familiar with the CMS. If I started hosting on one of GoDaddy's domain farm servers now, would it be difficult to switch to a unique IP plan down the road? Thanks guys
No, it won't be difficult to change you should be able to switch to Dedicated/Unique IP whenever you want. I did this with HostMonster, not sure about GoDaddy but you should be able to, I checked and it's $2.99 a month which is decent. Just in case you don't know, in case there are spammers or people using black hat techniques on your shared host it's really not a good idea to have the same IP's as them. As it could effect your search engine ranking. So, that's the benefit of Dedicated IP .
That makes a lot of sense, especially considering GoDaddy shares your economic hosting with like 3000 other sites on the same server. I guess one of them is bound to be a troublemaker Thanks for the explanation, man.
My thoughts are if your not sure about how you plan to progress the blog you should go with the free blog sites. They offer some good abilities to rank in the search engines. The problem is that you have no control over what happens. If you are serious about it you should host your own. The overall potential is much greater including flexibility, and income earning potential.
Buy a domain, then use blogger. I have some sites at #1 for competitive keywords. It just does not matter as long as you have a domain.
Check out the stories about spam and godaddy. Choose another registrar if you are serious about avoiding spam complaints in the future.
Yeah its always better to buy out hosting because you can enjoy lots freedom in it. So i 'll suggest to buy out your own.
As long as your site has no lack of uptime, hosting should not matter, Google will not see a difference
If your long term plan is to build a viable business then as the others have suggested it is much better to buy yourself a domain name and build yourself a business around that. Look for something which you can host wordpress on if you want to build a quick website. Not sure about godaddy but bluehost and hostgator seem to get good reviews. You could try a resellers account even if you don't want to resell it. It can give you more options.
Buy domain and host it with blogger , it should have no problem with SEO , you see.... one Google service should have no problem with another Google service
Google pick sites hosted on free hosting easily, there is no problem with SEO.. But yes buying a hosting for your own domain is something that makes you feel proud to be the owner of your site
Thank you all again for your input. I've decided to go with my own hosting for this particular project.