It was the year 2005. Having your own website was every person’s dream. Imagine having your own personal domain where you can do anything, post anything, and just be anything you want to be on the Internet. This domain can be seen by millions if not billions of people. You can be selling something, telling the world of what you think, or just plain storytelling. A personal website was more of a pipe dream than a reality 10 years ago.

So what happened today? Is having your own website still a dream a lot of us like having?

Lucky for us these days, having your own website has never been easier. Here are some reasons why:

1. It’s relatively cheaper to own a good website now than before. Owning a website means you should get a domain name and a hosting service. The prices from 10 years ago and today are quite the same but with some differences. Before, you can’t get 1 gb storage from a shared hosting package for less than 100$. Also, you were so limited in bandwidth before that your site goes down after the hundredth visitor of the day. If you are aiming to use your personal website more than often, it would be easier and much less stressful to have one now than before
2. It’s easier to set up a website now than before. Before, setting up your own website was very hard (not to mention very limited). Ordinary people had to get use to certain programming languages in order to create a website. One of the most common one was HTML. With HTML, you can create a simple and static page. The only problem was you had to do everything manually. And by saying everything, I mean every single line of code should be typed in manually. This was no problem for experts but this created a very large barrier of entry for your everyday ordinary people who wanted their own sites. Nowadays, you have backend platforms such as WordPress and Joomla. These frameworks basically do the dirty work for you. A little bit of tweaking will make your website a personalized one and you don’t even have to understand how the code works.
3. Websites these days are better but not necessarily hard to use. There was a time when people had to settle with static pages because going beyond that means having to learn a lot of complicated things. You were so limited with how your website looks like because to ask for more means having to spend hours more in learning how advanced code works. With today’s technology, websites work better and are faster but aren’t more complicated for the ordinary folk. You still had to read a “manual” of sorts to get the hang of it but once you do, changing the site into whatever you want it to be is much easier. This is aside the fact that various add-ons and plugins provided for free from developers make managing and keeping a website much easier than usual.
4. The benefits far outweigh the costs and stress of owning a website In retrospect, this should not be included in this list but I just had to mention it.
   Easy or not, having your own personal website is a big positive.It doesn’t matter if you are a professional, an artist, or a vocal individual. A
   personal website can easily become your “home” on the Internet. This will be where people can know more about you, find out what you do, what you think, or how they can contact you.

If you are still hesitant in having your own website, just do this for me. Go to our how to page and in 10 minutes you will be able to set up your first website? Tell me if you still won’t be swayed.

Ultimately, owning a website is not really about it being easy or complicated. It’s all about what it does for you as a person. Will this give your business more customers? Will this enrich your hobbies? Will this benefit other people who want to learn more? Think about what you can share to the world. With that in mind, you can easily create a website around that idea.