Subdomain or self-hosted own domain? What to choose for your blog?

It seems to be a hard choice to make

Hi guys what’s happening? Do you know what is the title is about? (Domain what?), have you ever wonder why some bloggers’ blog are far more interactive, pretty, and different from others? Fear not, the answer lies within this post, I think it is time to getting into a topic regarding a little bit how blogging works and why you should care about this, I am sure this post is definitely benefits you from being a professional blogger, I will try my best to keep my explanation non-technical, so keep up with me guys.

First of all, what is domain and subdomain? Basically domain is a name for an IP address (Internet Protocol), an IP address consist a numerical label for device which are linking together, it can occur during the linking between two PCs or PC to the internet. I bet you are confuse at this point, just think of a domain name is a caller ID in phone and IP address is the person’s number, so when you are going to call a specific persons, you are looking for their names instead of their mobile numbers. Another example of domain name in a website URL:

google.com

Subdomain is just an extension of the domain, it is used to identify a particular service or department for an organization, just like google play store:

play.google.com

So you see the “google.com” is Google’s domain name and because they have a lot of services, so they had made several subdomain to separates it. Alright what is going to with blog? Now you may have known that you can either register yourself a free blogging website or paid to have one, the difference as below:

Free blogging service

Using the subdomain of the blogging platform, meaning your blog URL address will end up like this:

yourfancyname.blogservicename.com

The name you chose will have an extra name at the back before the “.com” the “blogservicename” represent the blogging platform available for example, wordpress.com, blogspot.com, and etc.

The benefits

Personal blog
Good for posting for a non-business purpose, people use to blog about their life, the movie they just watched, and the food they liked and cooked. If you are the type of person who likes to keep a digital journal, free blog is a go.

For beginners

For those who thinking of having blogging as your full time job but your direction is not yet solid, you may try free blog first to kind of get yourself used to the writing and publishing post, or even playing around the widgets first. If you already decided to go for your own domain name, you can upgrade it from free service to paid service (no worries okay?)

Paid domain

The paid domain name or self-hosted domain, this is where the magic happens, you will have a complete control not just limited to your website URL name but to other flexibilities such as custom widget, blog templates. You pay for the server space yearly and you have to manage everything on your own. “Sounds good, but where do get one?” You may ask, well you can get yourself in the blogging platform itself because they do provide this service, well most of them or you may get from other hosting services such as

• Hostgator
•  iPage
•  justhost.com
•  bluehost
• hub

Above are the top 5 web hosting service during 2013, each of them has their own awesome benefits, just choose the one you need mostly. So what if you decide to choose the hosting service from non-blogging platform? Well luckily they provide some extra steps in “mapping” your registered domain name with their blog site, with a little service fees of course.

The benefits

Your blog’s URL looks more professional!
Whether in business name card or anywhere, your blog URL is shorter and the name is nicer, people will know that you are serious in having blog as your full time once you have registered yourself a domain name, and it’s easier to remember.

Flexibilities
You have flexibility in moving to another blogging platform to other blog platform (given the fact that your domain name is registered other than blog platform).

Ads

You have the control whether to include ads or not, and you can choose what ads to put in your blog.

SEO the way you want

Since having control of the content of the blog, templates and stuffs, you can set the SEO the way you wanted such as meta tags, link structures and many more. For more infor, you can learn what is SEO and why SEO is important for your blog

So I hope this post will let you have some basic ideas in what type of service you wanted, the blog I am writing to publish this blog is a subdomain of blogspot.com, although it is a free service but it does not mean that I do not treat it seriously, so do not have the idea that free is not serious, it is the journey of being what you are going to become. Alright good luck to you all in that.