Attention bloggers who blogs on blogspot (blogger.com) platform. I only have one advice. Please get your own domain name and use it as custom domain for your blogspot account because, whatever happen to blogspot, your domain stays with you – forever!
One classic example is blog of Malaysia’s ex prime minister; Dr. Mahathir Mohamad. Previously, his blog was hosted by blogspot. Not long after his blog become popular (remember the 1 million hits record?), blogspot unreasonably shut down his blog. Luckily he is using his own domain name; chedet.com. Can you imagine what a disaster it would have been if his blog’s address was something like chedet.blogspot.com? He would have lost all his readers. All the efforts in promoting the blog and search engine ranking would have gone down the drain! Now, his blog is self hosted using Movable Type (a blog CMS) on a dedicated server. Well, it was down for few days, but at least the damage was very minimal.
Don’t take it for granted. You never know what will happen in future. It could be another dotcom burst coming soon.
One great feature from blogspot is they allow you to use a custom domain name on blogspot platform. That means, you still blog normally using the same platform but using your own domain. How cool is that?
For example, if you own abc123.com, you can easily convert your current address from http://abc123.blogspot.com/ to http://abc123.com/ for free. Anyone who goes to the old address will redirect to your new domain. Not only you will not loose any readership, it is short and easy to remember too.
All you need is…
Finally, refer to this article to learn how to use a custom domain name on your blogspot account.
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