I had a domain for over a year now which I got from Libya’s biggest (and only) ISP,Libya Telecom and Technology, it wasn’t as good as I thought!
I had some expectations about getting a domain of my own, sadly none of them came true, even when I did my best promoting and getting my name out there!
- I thought it would look good on a resume.
People started to think (for some reason) that I’m really good with making sites, and all of a sudden I’m plagued with requests of making websites, I am not a web developer!
- I thought it would help get me a better job
I thought that having a site (not just a free hosted blog) would catch the eyes of HR personal and enhance my chance of nailing a dream job (any decent job in my case) but it didn’t! - Times aren’t so easy
With this economy I have to squeeze in every penny, and since the domain didn’t reel in any money or do anything real to enhance my career, then I’m better off making other investments and leave the domain for now. - Not making the full potential out of the domain I bought a domain and a hosting space in order to redirect users from my blogspot site to the domain, I didn’t upload anything on the server so it’s a total waste! I found an easy way to change the blog’s name across all posts, and that was awesome! And the space that was given to me was so small! I mean Google provides 15 GB of drive space, and a free hosting services, let alone that using a custom domain takes away the ability of using HTTPS to secure my site!
- Difficult to manage I’m using Google’s webmaster tools, and having a custom domains means I have four sites to manage (the blog, the blog with www, the domain, the domain with www) and dropping the custom domain would make the management easier, and since my domain is a country domain, it’s guided towards readers of that county, and my target is the world!!
- Promotion issues I thought having a custom domain would make twitter treat my URL differently, instead of taking 30 characters from the tweet it would take less (since I have a shorter domain), well that was not the case there! My url took the same amount of characters and I was in for a shocker! No HTTPS availability Since I linked my blogger domain to my purchased domain, my blogger domain is simply redirecting to my ly domain, in the process I lost HTTPS security because blogger doesn’t support that yet, meaning I’m less secure now than I was before getting the domain!
What happens next?
Life is all about experiences, I had a nice year with a custom LY domain, and now it’s time to go back to the old subdomain that blogspot provides, it’s not that bad, many professional bloggers, artists, and products use subdomains to blog, let alone me! Someone who is still finding his way in the world of blogging. Why should I pay for my site to be online and for people to read free of charge, while I can keep it hosted for free? It would take me some work to change all my bios and social media sites to the new site, but I’m sure it’s worth the effort! And I think that my stats will improve so much after dumping the LY domain which I think it limiting me from reaching my total potential (due to google’s geographic location settings). Do you have a custom domain? How much do you pay for it? What’s your current plan? And finally: What do you think of me going back to a free service hosted by Google? Waiting for your comments below!