Hubpages Vs Your Own Website

Hubpages is a website through which you can host your articles, reviews, blogs, pics, videos and much more, very much like you can do with your own site. However, it is not exactly the same as running your own website and this article weighs the pros and cons.


Can I Host Anything I Want On HubPages?

Although there are limitations to what you can do on HubPages, the limitations will probably not be relevant to most of you reading this. Most people looking to start a website, or open a HubPages account, is interested in sharing their articles, graphics, photos and videos. If you are one of these people, Hubpages is made for you!

But if you would like to go into the nuts and bolts of your computer, fiddle around with the innards of HTML or host a MMORPG, then you might find that HubPages is not your cup of tea. The following are some of the things that you can't do with your hub:

• Run a Java, Javascript or PHP program. Actually, you can't run any kind of program on HubPages, and that also means no HTML tags and CSS.
• Install any kind of program on the server.
• Display your text in any other color other than black.
• Perform fancy formatting. But you do have the basics like bolding, italics, underline, linking and tables, which are more than enough for displaying most types of content.

A Community Of Users

When you start a website, it stands alone. If you do no promotion, you will definitely get no visitors. Even the search engine spiders will stay away as they will have no way of knowing about you.

If you use blogging software like Wordpress to design your site, you might have a little more luck getting visitors as your post will be pinged and you should get a couple of visitors. But this will be immediately after each post, and it is likely to drop down to zero after the post.

Even when you start to actively promote your site, it is a long and hard road, and each and every visitor will be hard fought. It is more than likely that even after months of work, the number of your site's visitors may total less than one hundred per day once you stop your promotions.

When you start a hub on HubPages, you are automatically a part of the HubPages community. Of course, you are still going to have to work at promoting your hub, but you already have a ready community to interact with. And, if you are active in the HubPages community, or if you work at promoting your hub in other places on the web, HubPages will work at more actively promoting your hub within its community.

Your own website or your own hub within HubPages both require promotional work. But, for the same amount of work done, you will probably get much more visitors to your hubs than to your own website.


Search Engine Traffic

Search engine traffic are most sought after as these are the visitors that are looking for what you are selling. And as such, the competition for them is keen.

The page rank of your website is Google's determination of the importance of your site, with a page rank of zero being the lowest and ten being the highest. In the search engine results, all other things being equal, a site with a higher page rank will definitely feature higher than a site with a lower rank.

As a new site, you will not have a page rank. As time goes by, your site will get a page rank, probably starting at zero, and slowly increasing as you build more links to your site. After maybe a year, your site may get a page rank of three or four, which is not bad by most standards.

When you start a hub, your hub is associated with the HubPages domain, which has a page rank of 5. That is, without any promotion at all, your hub is automatically looked at by Google as pretty important, and should rank rather well with its associated keywords.


Hosting Cost

A HubPages account is free and you can start as many hubs as you want. But do take into account that they do "charge" by taking a percentage of your Google AdSense impressions.

With your own website, you will have to pay for the domain and the web hosting charges, which is very affordable these days. But every single visitor is yours and yours only.


Conclusion

As it is with everything in life, there is no definite answer. In general, a HubPages account gives you the advantage of a very easy way of starting a web presence, with a ready audience. However, there are limits to what you can do with a hub, and this might be critical for some webmasters.

My recommendation would be to have the best of both worlds. As a person new to the ways of the web, open a HubPages account and explore the world of online publishing, Internet business and Internet marketing. Once you get the hang of it, consider a website of your own for more flexibility while maintaining your presence on HubPages to support your website.

If you are a seasoned webmaster, HubPages would be a useful tool to use in support of your site. In addition, it is also very useful if there are niches that you would like to explore, but is not yet up for the work needed to set up a website for those niches. Just start up a few hubs for the niches, and only when you are ready, then you can start a website.