Why You Need a Self Hosted Website
Why do you need a self hosted website? In a word – control.
Awhile back I started an online retail store. It had a very catchy name with a very specific niche. I was new to the world of websites and hadn’t done much design work so I decided to use a third party hosting company. Setting up the store was a snap, I had the store up and running within one day. The platform was slick and the interface was very easy to use. But I hit a problem immediately.
The website address had to be a subdomain to the hosting company. I’ll use my own website as an example to illustrate. I self host this site, and you can see that the website name (the URL, or the domain) is www.kferrin.com. If I were using a third party hosting solution though, that address would be something like www.kferrin.wordpress.com. This isn’t necessarily a problem, but it absolutely dilutes your ability to establish a brand and a name. Your brand is nestled within the larger brand of the hosting company – not great.
At the time though I thought it would be too hard to figure out how to do all that fancy schmancy stuff on my own, so I decided to swallow the frustration with branding and push forward. I figured my product and my hard work would overcome that issue. But it wasn’t very long until I ran into a second problem.
I decided I wanted to have a blog alongside my business. The niche I was targeting was perfect for a blog and I felt the brand needed it. It would allow me to deepen the brand and build a community around the product. But come to find out I couldn’t have a blog as part of the store site. Or more accurately, I could have a blog over at WordPress or Blogspot or some other third party hosted blog, and I could add a link to it from my store, but I couldn’t have a blog that was a part of my store.
See, when you self host a site you can create any type of pages you like, and they all fall within your main website address. Again, looking at this site you can see I have a blog (you’re reading it!), and I also have a store where I sell my books and book related swag. All of these have www.kferrin.com in their title which gives me consistent branding through the store, my blog, and any other pages I choose to add. With the third party hosting company I couldn’t do that. I would have had to use www.kferrin.someothercompany.com as my store domain, and www.kferrin.blogspot.com as my blog name (assuming kferrin was even available at Blogspot).
Another reason to self hosting your site is that it also allows you to move without losing customers. I use Bluehost for my hosting company and I love them. But if I didn’t love them I could move to Hostgator or Dreamhost (or anyone else) and still have www.kferrin.com as my website name. All the hard work I’ve done to build a readership and establish my brand comes with me. When you use a third-party to host your site you can’t do this. When you move to another hosting company you have to change the name of your site as well.
It can be very intimidating to think about self hosting a website. You are a writer after all, not a web designer. This series will walk you through step by step how to get your self hosted author website up and running. I’ll walk you through picking a name for the site (the domain), purchasing that domain, finding and selecting a hosting company and getting your site beautified and ready for readers.
Don’t let your worlds of wonder get stuck behind bars.
The first article in this series is The Importance of a Website to Your Author Platform. If you are not the DIY sort I can help you get your website up off the ground quickly and with minimal expense. You can find the details for my web design services here.
