- You could do absolutely NOTHING. You could just sit on it until you have an idea about what you want to develop in the future. It makes more sense to have it and not need it NOW, than to want it but can’t get it later. You keep ownership of your domain name until you stop paying for it.
- Set up your own email with it. You own your own domain name. Now you can start using it. Owning your own domain opens up a few more options you now have available to you. It’ll take getting some hosting if you want more control over the functionality of what you’re trying to do. Setting up your own custom email addresses (after all, you may want a direct one for you, customer support, your cousin who helps sometimes) is not very complicated if you follow a few steps.
For that PDF, CLICK HERE. It has screenshots of everything I could show you without getting too far into the weeds.
The good thing is that hosting is very affordable if you’re a beginner. For your upfront investment you can always go month to month if you want to try it out without purchasing months or years at a time (increasing the upfront cost).
- Start a Blog, E-Commerce Store or even a Basic informational presence for your customers or friends to have a base to keep in touch with you. You can purchase enough hosting for one site or multiple sites and multiple emails. You can start as small as you want or upgrade to an account where you can set up multiple side businesses or experiment with different ideas for websites. Just keep in mind that nothing is written in stone. If you find that you’d like to transfer to another host or a different domain registrar, you can still do that. The key is to get started sooner than later.
More On Hosting
Signing up for your own web hosting sounds like a huge deal, and in a way it is. It’s like an investment in a dream, idea or plan that you’ve been working on. On the other hand, there are monthly plans where you can try it out. There’s usually a money back guarantee. You can always upgrade. If you have some money saved up for the purpose, you can sign up for a longer period and save extra money. They’re pretty flexible and there are a lot of options.
Many of the domain name registrars do hosting and many of the web hosting companies can register your domain, so there’s some overlap. Sometimes it makes sense to have all your services in one place and sometimes it’s good to mix and match to get a slight advantage to set you up slightly better for the future. You have the Free Whois Guard with your Namecheap account, coupled with your Hostgator account with the FREE SSL certificates. Rest assured, those aren’t the only ones out there and they may or may not be the best or worst. It’s what I started out with and I still use their services. They both have hosting and domain name registering capabilities.
If you are the type who can make decisions quickly, I’d say watch a few videos and see which one suits you the best and act on it. That’s the key.
Saving money here and there adds up over time as you progress through your online presence journey. Some of the software, plugins or even services you may want later can save you money and time later. Moreover, there are so many plugins out there for WordPress that there are workarounds for most of the goals you’d like to accomplish for free.
I hope this was helpful in laying out some of the reasons you’d want your own domain name. At the very least, you can own the one you wanted until you learn a little more about the next step.
Subscribe to my website for access to my Checklist PDFs with screenshots when possible.
Own My Own Name