Why you need a Domain/Website Name Registered

 

Not having your own domain name will create the following perception in the minds of most people:

	Probably new
	Definitely small
	Maybe part time
	Probably not a real company

A strong possibility of being a "shady operator" Having your own domain does not lead people to automatically trust you. However, with this small step you will successfully alter their perception of you to:

	Probably established
	Could be large or small
	Full time
	Probably a real company
	Being a "shady operator" not impossible

Can you see the potential in the differences?

Another important point of course is branding. You want your name to become known and familiar. Something that people can remember easily. Something they will associate with what you do. That's a tall order if you don't have your own name to begin with. With your own domain name, plus the right words and correct image, your task of creating trust is that much easier.

With the cost of new domain names now cheaper than ever, you really have no excuse for not obtaining your own. The small fee that you pay per year for your own domain name is peanuts compared to the benefits that you get.

Our company is a big & reputable one. Every one knows it, I don't need a website.

If your company is big and/or reputable, then people expect you to have a website before any other company else. If not, people think "what is wrong with this company? They don't even have a website?". Do you know any big and/or reputable company with no telephone? I'm sure you don't. These days, website became as important as a telephone. For example, every one of us know about Maruti car. Isn't? Just because every one knows about Toyota, Toyota did not stop there. They've their own website

I published my website on a free hosting service. Why should I've my own website name?

If you put up your website with one of the free web hosting services, the only company who benefits is the web hosting company, NOT you. The last person who benefits is you. There are many reasons why having your own website name is a must:

1. When you have your own website name, the address of your website will be of the form http://YourCompany.com. On the other hand, if you put up your website on one of the free servers, the address of your website will be something like: http://SomeFreeWebsite.com/YourWebSite/. Which of these two sounds more professional? Which of these two is smaller and is hence easier to remember? Note that, every person who access web knows that it is a free hosting company and you published your reputable company information on the FREE hosting servers and you don't have your own. Compare this with "Having your own telephone number for your company versus giving a PP telephone of your neighbor shop." PP number clearly tells that you don't have your own telephone number and a small company.
2. Just imagine having to change host for your website. All the work of promoting of your URL goes into the trash! Sure you might be able to set up a redirect for a month or so, but ultimately you'd have to do all your previous promotion all over again from scratch.
3. Imagine, the FREE hosting service closed their service similar to Hyderabad.com! Immediately every single link to your website from anywhere in the universe is broken! All search engine and directory listings would be useless to you! You will loose all of your visitors. Frightening, isn't it? As a website name is simply a pointer to an address, having your own website name means you can change hosts at any time. Your website name remains the same, only the address of the server it points to changes. Compare this moving to a new home and keeping the same telephone number. No loss of visitors, no wasted promotion!
4. I'm not established now, I'll register my website name for my company later. Don't put it off until you're more established. If you wait for to become reasonably popular before deciding to register your name, you will probably find you're too late. Someone else will have already taken the name! Then what will you do? There is a rumour that one of our most popular Telugu newspaper paid about one crore rupees to get their website name, because some one else registered that name long before. Remember that there are more than 3.5 crore websites registered and thousands of websites are registered every single day.
5. Build credibility: The only way to make money online is to build up credibility among your customers. Having your own website 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 website name. It makes your customers feel that they are dealing with a large, established company, rather than with some fly-by-night operator. Click here to build credibility by registering a domain for your business now
6. When you have your own website name, you can have multiple emails of the form name@YourCompany.com. This allows you to assign different emails to different functions. For example, for questions on products & services that you sell, you can direct your visitors to sales@YourCompany.com. For comments/ suggestions about your website, you can direct them to feedback@YourCompany.com. Having different email addresses for different functions not only makes it easier for you to filter your email using your email client program such as Outlook Express etc., but also gives your customers the impression that yours is a large, established company with whom it is safe to do business.
7. Many search engines give a lot of emphasis to the home page of a particular website, i.e. other things remaining the same, a home page of a website will often rank higher for a particular keyword than any other page. When you use some of the free hosting services, your index.html page is the home page of your website, but not of that your free hosting website. Hence in these search engines, your website will find it very difficult to make it to the top 20 or top 30, let alone the top 10 for some of the really competitive keywords. Just think of the amount of traffic that you will lose if this happens. In case you don't know what a search engine is, it is something like a 197 directory information or enquiry counter, where you ask for information. Search engines index websites and keep all that information handy. When you want to find out which website has the information you're looking for, you go to search engine such as Google.com and it tells you all the websites that have the information you're looking for.
8. Some search engines are now refusing to spider the websites which are hosted by the free web hosts. For instance, if you have a website hosted by the free web hosts, you would, until recently, have got the infamous error message saying that too many pages have been submitted from your website if you tried to submit your website to search engine AltaVista. While Altavista now says that "your URL has been submitted for processing" if you try to submit your website, rest assured that it will not spider any website belonging to many of the free web hosts even though it says that your website has been accepted. Can you afford that?
9. When your website is hosted by some of the free web hosts, you will find it very difficult to get it listed in a major directory like Yahoo.com. Although Yahoo.com will never admit that it won't add a commercial site which is hosted by one of the free web hosts, in practice, it will be a miracle if you can get your website listed by Yahoo.com. Listing your website with Yahoo.com is difficult enough even when you have your own website. Don't make your task more difficult than what it needs to be.