Everyone likes to save money and everyone wants to earn money. Be sure that you carefully consider the initial savings without weighing the possible future implications of your decision.

Let me explain. When you begin a website, you will find all kinds of free web space. However it comes with a price. Some web hosts place banner ads on your site, irritating visitors and spoiling any aesthetics you might have developed. All however, force you to use a sub-domain which remains under the web-hosts ownership and control.

You take the free site and build a popular site with traffic which eventually exceeds the allowable bandwidth offered by the “free” website. What to do? Very simply, you must move your site. So you obtain a domain, and shop for a hosting plan. The URL is different so the traffic you’ve built up over the time you had the free site is lost. Sure, some will find you, but many will not, at least not immediately.

The search engines will require time to find and re-index your site. Time is indeed money, and if you are making an effort to monetize your site, this move could be very expensive.

My advice is to begin with your own domain and look for a low cost host that has Fantastico, for one click installation of approximately 45 programs including blogging, forums, content management, and photo galleries. The site should also allow MySQL Databases: if it has Fantastico, it undoubtedly does.

I know this from experience. I moved three blogs from Blogger to here on BlueHost. I started this website on BlueHost in late December. I have about as much traffic on this site as I have on the sites I moved. If you are shopping for a hosting service, consider BlueHost. They have one click installation of WordPress, arguably the most popular blog platform available.

If you do decide on BlueHost, please consider clicking the link. I make a little, you save a lot, and we’ll both be happy. If you want to get BlueHost without me getting anything, just go to www.bluehost.com. Either way, the cost to you is the same. It’s your choice. Thank you.