someone offered to give me a website

Jenny Lynne

Jenny Lynne

"To live would be an awfully big adventure"
My recent video got me tons of views and subscribers. I was going around and commenting on the subscriber's videos, and discussion pages. Someone like what I said and noticed that I didn't have a website yet, so he offered to donate one and take care of the hosting as well.

While this is a generous and greatly appreciated offer, I'm not sure if I'm even at the point where it makes sense for me to have a website yet. When does it make sense to?

And are there any problems I could come up from accepting a gift, such as this, from someone that I do not know?

Thank you!
Jenny
 
The potential issue is them not giving you your website or content if you ever decide to leave, set out an agreement what will happen in those circumstances. If you fancy a free website I would try hosted Wordpress as you can export your blog at any time and go self hosted in the future, the same with blogger. I am also pretty sure you can convert from blogger to Wordpress if you ever need to too :)
 
Jenny Lynne said:
My recent video got me tons of views and subscribers. I was going around and commenting on the subscriber's videos, and discussion pages. Someone like what I said and noticed that I didn't have a website yet, so he offered to donate one and take care of the hosting as well.

While this is a generous and greatly appreciated offer, I'm not sure if I'm even at the point where it makes sense for me to have a website yet. When does it make sense to?

And are there any problems I could come up from accepting a gift, such as this, from someone that I do not know?

Thank you!
Jenny
Click to expand...

Call me cynical, but there's no such thing as a free lunch. My guess is either:

-There would be obtrusive ads on your "free website" and he'd get all the revenue.
-He will try to upsell a better solution to you in the future. (at a high cost)

Either way, like @Michael says if you don't have server access, you basically have no control over the website and are at his "mercy". That could be a problem in the future if/when the website takes off.

You'd be much better off either starting with a solution like Wordpress like Michael suggests with your own domain name that you choose, purchase and have full control of and maybe in the meantime, learn about how to make and host a basic website yourself. A basic website isn't that hard to make and hosting costs are pretty low. The most important thing though is to have full control and server access (username/password) yourself :)
 
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You should nicely decline, because you wouldn't have full control of the website. Just use wordpress, blogger, weebly, etc :)
 
What has been said above is true, At the minimum, make sure you're in control of the domain name so you can pull the plug if he goes nuts
 
Thank you everyone for your thoughts and suggestions! It really helped me out. I told him I really appreciated it, but I'm not ready for a website at this time. He seemed pretty pleased, and told me that I rock. :-D

That made me very happy. :-)
 
I just saw you decided to not get one, but if you ever do let me know and I'd be happy to help you out!

Sometimes it makes sense when you have a decent amount of subscribers and want to start something like creating ebooks or starting a newsletter. I know your niche is DIY stuff, so if you ever wanted to create something like a recipe book with your favorites and sell it, then it would definitely make sense. But like the others said, make sure you have full control!
 
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