If you care about your online presence and blog you must own your domain

Control the domain name your blog is on!

We've given that advice repeatedly on this website. Read the "Control Your Online Real Estate" paragraph in the Bluehost review. Also read the blog post, "Why move your Wordpress.com blog to a self hosted blog on your own domain".

If you don't believe or listen to us at Website Hosting Reviews, then take the advice of Fred Wilson. Who's Mr. Wilson? Only one of the most influential venture capitalists in the world today. Fred Wilson was an early investor in Twitter, Tumblr, Discus, and many other big time internet companies. His blog "A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC" is one of the most read blogs on the internet today.

Here's what Wilson has to say about self-hosting your "long-form" blog on a domain you control - "Have a long form blog on a domain that you own and that is permanent." This is his #1 lesson in his "Fred Wilson school of blogging" post.

Another influential technology blogger, Marco Ament, had this to say on blogging on a domain you own and control - "If you care about your online presence, you must own it. I do, and that’s why my email address has always been at my own domain, not the domain of any employer or webmail service." That also means your blog should be on, yep you guessed it, your own domain.

If you're hosting your blog on yourblogurl.blogger.com, yourblogurl.wordpress.com, or another similar free blog hosting services, you don't own your online presence. You just failed Fred Wilson's #1 rule in blogging.

Who knows when those services will no longer exist. It does happen; numerous free hosts have gone the way of dinosaurs over the years. Remember Geo Cities? In fact, in just the last few weeks Apple has announced MobileMe web hosting will be phased out.

So learn from the masters - self host your blog on your own domain ("self host" doesn't necessarily mean hosting your blog on a web server you own - cheap shared web hosts like Hostgator or Bluehost do a wonderful job with blogs). It's never too late to do it right.

If you care about your online presence and blog you must own your domain.

 

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