Why Nigerian bloggers should make use of paid web hosting

Posted by Felix Okoli on Saturday September 13, 2014 at 13:4:22:

Blogging is a great way to express oneself and interact with the world wide knowledge seeker community. Lots of noob bloggers prefer to start safe and small. This is a good decision as it is never wise to invest a lot of money on a business that has not started yielding income just yet. However, at the same time, what is worth doing is still worth doing well. There are some pitfalls to being “safe” by using free hosting platforms and this article will tell you why.

Firstly, there is the issue of not being able to have your own domain name. This is really important. One of our recent articles talked about having the importance of a domain name and the characteristics of the ideal domain name.

Try to look that up but in summary, a domain name should be concise and easy to remember. Free hosting does not allow for using your own domain name. Using free hosting means you would have to use their own domain with an extension e.g www.yourblogname.paidhostname.com. This means a long “domain” name which is not great news if you are looking for lots of traffic. You should be looking for it because no matter how small your niche is if there are no visitors, it would be pointless to blog about it. You can only get great traffic irrespective of the length if you have sweated it out, are well established and popular blogger like Linda Ikeji. Also, your content should be absolutely awesome; entertaining and with great information that really can’t be easy to find elsewhere. Let’s face it, that’s not usually the case but the internet has no score card so less still works (yay!)

Secondly, with paid hosting you get more custom options. You can only customise free hosting themes et al so much. Paid hosting is way more flexible and gives you way more control over how your website or blog looks than free hosting.

Also, with free hosting you don’t get a lot of tools that can help your Search engine Optimization. The case is largely different with paid hosting. You get access to an arsenal of tools that will help improve your website visibility.
Using free hosting ensures no ads are shown on your pages without your consent.

With paid hosting, you have no choice! As long as you use their platform, they can serve ads as they like and there really is not much you can do about it. This means they get to profit from your traffic. You work hard on getting your traffic and there is absolutely no reason you should share your sweat with any service provider. Paid hosting is cheap enough and will ensure you enjoy all of your traffic getting investments.

You might not be the sharpest tool in the blogging shed; you don’t have to be either. However, everyone has to be master of something to get some attention and make some money online. Be the King of your own jungle today. Use paid hosting and reap 100 percent of what you work for.