Should I have a paid website?
Not very long ago, owning a website was considered a luxury. Irony is, it still is considered luxury by many, including leading business houses. While having an independent (I will explain it further down) website comes in at a price of around Rs.200 per month, there are lot more places where websites also come in for free. So the question “Should I have a paid website?“. Read on…
I have introduced the term “independent website” above. An independent or full control website, is a website where the owner/administrator/organisation/team of the website has full control over what is displayed, when and how is the content displayed. Of course, there might be separate team of people within big organisations who would work on the actual content of the website, it would still be considered as independent. In an independently hosted website, the webmaster (server administrator for the websites’ servers) has got substantial amount of control on the hosting servers and has access to the parameters which he/she can use to fine tune the server for better performance of the applicaiton. Shared hosting, dedicated hosting and VPN hosting are considered the hostings for independent or full control website. With full control websites, you also have the options of several programming languages and databases which come in with most of the hosting packages.
On the other hand, there are certain web companies which let you host a few of your webpages (or rather your content on their webpages) on their server for free. The access to the hosting servers is either restricted or absent altogether. Examples of free websites are Yahoo Geocities and Google Blogspot services. For the sake of being unbiased, let us call them “Free Hosting Website (FHW)”. A user is required to register and start publishing the content on an FHW. This typically is a sub-domain of the FHW. The FHW would in turn display the content you publish in a webpage along with some of their advertisements on some part of the webpage. You get the website (sub-site) for free and FHW makes money out of the advertisements being displayed on your webpage. A win-win situation for both? Not exactly. While you have freedom to display your content, you have a restriction on how much and how you can write. Moreover, there is no direct control over what advertisements are being displayed by FHW on such a page. In turn, if you are a business entity, it could be your competitors’ advertisements being displayed, even worse, some FHWs display adult material on their free sites which would not be good for a sound business reputation on any day. Not to forget that if some day your FHW goes out of business or decides to discontinue the free offer, you might be forced to pay or even worse, you might loose all your content along with all the networking and advertisement which you have put in for the web address would be lost.
But then, picture is not so gloomy with free websites. Google, for example, lets you have a blog for free and lets you make money out of it by participating in Google AdSense. So all is not bad in free hosting.
As mentioned in my earlier article Do I need a website?, a website is not just a place on the internet, it is also a identity of an individual/group/corporation on the world wide web and not just what you put on your webpages but also how you display it to the user also matters to this identity and to your business in whole. The answer to this question again depends on what you need a website for. If you intend to have a corporate website to potray your company, your products, your offerings, etc. then you require full control of your website at all times. You can not rely on limited file type support, limited FTP access and almost absent statistics of the website.
Hence, considering several points mentioned above, I would recommend a full control website if the website means something to you and losing it would mean a loss of either material or intellectual property to you. On the other hand, if you just want some place on the internet to either exhibit your scribing skills or to pen your feelings, a free blog would be more suitable. Lastly, the decision is yours.
Related Articles:
What is a website?, Do I need a website?
Useful Info:
Earn revenue from your website through Google AdSense.