What's the problem with a domain hosted at Free Weebly or Blogger?

Never even knew that you could get a domain hosted for free.

Thanks I'm going to look into this more.

Interested too on any seo pitfalls or benefits.

I tested the free blogger for my squeeze pages.I found they did not convert well because they did not look very professional.I moved over to a new squeeze page developer and have made huge improvements in my conversions.

There are actually lots of reasons why hosting with blogger is not a good option if you are planning to have a long-term website.

1. you don't have full control of the domain
2. You can't sell the site on it's right market value
3. SEO limitations
3. Design limitations
4. and more I forgot to mention....

You will simply tend to make less money. Now, even though it's possible to succeed with free domains, you will most likely not.

People won't take you seriously, plus the domain name is too long to remember.

Plainly put - It just doesn't look Professional

This might shock a few people here but I never have used wordpress yet. I have been building wix sites and lately they have been nailing google to the top of the ranks. Other threads have warned to stay away from wix but I dont see the big deal. Dont do wix if you are looking for adsense cash.

I have used blogger for blogs because it was super easy to slap together. My blog looks cheap as ever but its all about my content which is a DIY blog. Another thing is its also super cheap. 10 bucks for your own .com for a year hosted on blogger.

Blogger does not work good at all if you are trying to promote an offline business or tyring to make anything other than a blog, obviously.

I never used weebly but I will check it out now.

Hosting is $9.95 a auto-responder is $19.95 for the first 500 subscribers and a domain is $7.00 per year. If this were a brick and mortar business wouldn't you want to own your own business location if you could afford it? You can own it for really cheap online.

Ofcourse it help in SEO if your domain do come with keyword that you wish to target . It would be best to get a domain with .com extension or a country domain extension , it depend where you target.
A professional website need a own domain and not subdomain which everyone knew it .

Those who know that you are using free hosting, may wonder
why you are doing that. They often will consider that an indicator
that you are struggling, and especially if you are teaching people
how to build successful, professional-looking businesses, there
is just a disconnect.

It also indicates to some that you don't have enough confidence
in your business to invest in "better", more professional hosting.

Willie

In my opinion:

Weebly is a FAR BETTER option and I've tested in extensively!

I've got multiple page 1 rankings from using Weebly, and the sites look great.

At the end of the day, flash ain't cash, and you're not building an art gallery online.

Having said that, it's "horses for courses" and you need to choose what's right for you.

Hope that helps!

David Cavanagh

PS... Work out the pro package with Weebly, plus your domain name registration with Godaddy or Namecheap and it's a BRILLIANT offer if you work it out correctly!

You right, lack of control could be one reason. Plus if you pratice unethical methods of promotion or something is dodgy about the content, they may report you to the domain registrar and you may lose the domain. The chances of this to nhappen on your own server (even given the same practices) are much less, as there are no moderators checkeing your site like on social networks. Overall, the risk is higher I think.

I'm a Wordpress guy all the way but I can understand where someone just starting out will have cost restrictions. That said, a domain will run you under $10 and there's some pretty cheap hosting out there these days...$7/mo and less. So I have to ask the question that if using Wordpress (or some other platform for that matter) is the end result your after, why waste time learning how to use a free platform when you'll just need to learn another one later on?

Above all, I guess the real answer here is to not put unnecessary roadblocks in your path! Just make it work how you can and move forward from there!

I'm just so deep into Wordpress I suppose I'm a bit biased about it and can't see the need for another option. But, like I said, it's best to eliminate roadblocks, not create them. If Wordpress is a roadblock in any way, go elsewhere I say!

Ron,

I know Wordpress backwards, and I tour the World teaching it at the largest internet marketing seminars, events and workshops (been featured speaker at World Internet Summit, 7 Figure Code, Money Masters, Global Internet Masters and many more).

I'm not saying WP is bad, because it's brilliant, but Weebly has now come out as one of the best wysiwyg platforms there is on the market. For newbies starting out, it's FAR EASIER than Wordpress.

I can show you how WP can be EASILY hacked, broken into, pulled off the server and it creates nightmares for people each and every day - even your actual site is open to being hacked and you're still displaying the readme.html page on your site.

I have to put my personal feelings and love of Wordpress to the side, and tell you that Weebly is a great platform now - it used to be very basic, but it's got so much added into it and the cost is FAR LESS if you add the pro account and domain registration (registration done with NameCheap or GoDaddy).

Weebly: $72 for 10 sites for 2 years (including unlimited hosting with 100 meg maximum uploads per upload).

Work that out: $3.60 per year per domain with Weebly and $9 to register the domain name. Less than $13 a year to have an incredible site, full hosting and wysiwyg editor that's also mobile friendly and can be zipped up and downloaded at any stage to FTP to another hosting company if the need be.

Just me 20 cents worth

David Cavanagh

This really isn't right at all, Alyona.

Sorry, but you've rather missed the point, here. It's not about ownership of the domain. The OP is asking about hosting a site on a domain which he owns at Weebly or Blogger, as thousands of people do.

You can do that (and for a lot less than $20, by the way) but you'll still have the same problem.
This isn't about the domain: it's about the terms of service of the hosting.

You can own your own domain-name, registered elsewhere (e.g. Namecheap, or wherever) and still host a website on it at Blogger or Weebly, just as you can host it at Hostgator or Justhost or wherever.

I have sites hosted at Weebly (I use the paid upgrade, not the free hosting, but you can do this on the free hosting, too) which are now in their fourth successful year. Weebly is an excellent host.

Using Blogger, though, makes absolutely no sense at all. You can see why from all the threads like this one.

It's not the fact that Blogger is free that's the problem, though. Yola and Blinkweb and 000WebHost and Byethost and Weebly are all free, too, but none of them has the same problems and drawbacks that Blogger (and Squidoo and HubPages) have.

This has nothing to do with who owns the domain. Hosting at Blogger is hosting at Blogger, and being subject to their terms of service, whether you own the domain-name yourself or use one of their subdomains. It makes no difference at all to the relevant parts of their terms of service.

A careful read of this one thread is really all you need, to see why Blogger's so unsuitable: Squidoo/Blogger as primary website

But if you want more, these posts/threads may also help ("Blogger", "HubPages" and "Squidoo" are all the same in this regard - they're all unsafe and owned by someone else who changes the rules frequently and interprets them idiosyncratically and inconsistently and is in control of "your" site, which you can never own!) ... but that has nothing to do with ownership of the domain, as mistakenly suggested above.

Too Much Advertising on Squidoo??
Is Squidoo still okay to post article to?
How to subtly advertise on Squidoo and Hubpages?
How do I Use Squidoo Effectively?
Advice on Squidoo
What's the value of a Squidoo Lens?
Using Hubpages, Squidoo, and Tumblr to generate backlinks

Yow will not be getting the full control of what your are doing that is basic difference. One more thing is you can't do anything if your weebly or blogger got hacked or crashed even if your having a back up with yourself it is not easy to restore.

Prithvitheprime,

Sorry to be straight forward here, but you don't know Weebly!

You have got full control of your content at all times, a download of the entire site is available 24/7 with the click of a mouse button (which downloads the whole site in a zip file) which can be FTP'ed to a brand new server within a minute or two.

How is that not easy to restore?

David Cavanagh

PS... The discussion of this thread is about a domain that is owned! We're not talking about a free sub domain running off Weebly or Blogger (Blogspot), so it's always easy to move, redirect, change name servers, forward etc. You've got control like any other host!

I have sites on WordPress and a bunch on Weebly simply because it's easy for myself and other workers to edit quickly.

That being said, the SEO is not a problem for me and I have several Weebly hosted sites (with my own domain name) that are ranking on the first page of Google with many above PR2 after a short period of time....and for the price point you can't beat it.

I prefer to have complete control over all the aspects of my websites... especially design and layout. These free services limit the control...

And you get out of it.. what you put into it... (People that are generally trying to find the simplest, cheapest, and easiest way to do things, often find less success....(just from my experience))

DrumGuru69,

Again, you don't know the new look Weebly either!

You guys are commenting from the space of not knowing Weebly now.

Blogger is not easy... agreed... but Weebly is a different kettle of fish!

And please believe me, I was against the Weebly of old, but not now.

(Plus I've taught more students, and got more results than 99% of all Warriors)

David Cavanagh

These companies can also shut down your website for no apparant reason. It's always safer to host your sites on HostGator etc so you have complete control. I never feel completely safe when hosting on Blogger etc...

Hey , Can we even do that !! thats awesome .

Only thing that will stop me from using the free hosting, is a possibility of support issue. If your site goes down due to your hosting just when you are all set with content and other good hard work put in then can we expect support like If it was say hostgator or something similar , you bet not as they dont make money and they cannot afford to loose more by providing FREE suppport. While understand the point about newbies it makes a good business sense to invest the $5 per month and get it hosted in a place where they can sleep well at night :-) and build their business ..

But as always it is good to know we can even do this and can use it for some test projects until a point where you feel you can turn it to a money making web real estate , then immediately switch over .

When hosting with them you will get a subdomain rather then an actual domain. You are limited with bandwidth on the site meaning you will have a very small percentage of visitors each day, once the max has been reached your site no longer loads. If done right you can still make money but very little when it comes to affiliate marketing and such. They are best to link to an actual site as most web 2.0 sites are good for, best way to get one way links.

I'm sure there some SEO experts here but I would think there would be some slight disadvantages when using Weebly vs. a Wordpress site. I think it really depends on your purpose...if you're promoting an affiliate site or some CPA offers Weebly could be good enough to do the trick. Whereas if you require a more professional, finished look, clearly Wordpress is a better choice. With the ever evolvng changes in SEO, it's debatable which one platform works better..this is a interesting piece