There are a number of reasons why having your own domain name is a must:

1) When you have your own domain name, address of your web site will be of form http://www.yoursite.com. On other hand, if you put up your site on one of free servers, address of your web site will be something like http://www.somefreewebsite.com/yoursite/. Which of these two sounds more professional? Which of these two is smaller and is hence easier to remember? I leave you to make judgement.

2) The only way to make money online is to build up credibility among your customers. Having your own domain name is first step in doing that. Your customers will feel more comfortable buying whatever it is that you are selling if you have your own domain name. It makes your customers feel that they are dealing with a large, established company, rather than with some fly by night operator.

Did you know that most powerful software and web applications are all free? Yes that's right, just about every commercial software or web application you know of is most likely available as a free Open Source project/clone.

"Why haven't I heard of this Open Source stuff???" There is good reason for not seeing advertising for open source software in ppc search engines, if you had a free product, you would not be likely to pay for top advertising spots, or even worry about your search engine placement. Open Source projects rely on word of mouth and fact that it's free, well you all know that 'FREE' is most viral form of advertising. Also, open source community is a tight group of developers and programmers who often exchange links, so if you don't know right places to look, you can spend days and weeks searching out top open source applications.

Don't worry though, this article has a list of top open source applications, as well as links to top open source search engines.

"But I always thought you had to be a techno-geek to install or use these applications?" This is way it used to be just a few years ago, but times have rapidly changed in Open Source world, and focus is now on more userfriendly, step by step installations and control panels, so you don't need to know much of anything to get these apps up and running.

Now, only downfall of an Open Source application compared to a Commercial application... NO DIRECT SUPPORT. However, as in all web based communities, there are hundreds of thousands of people using these applications, and there are always community support forums where you can get help from veteran users. Community Support can often be ten times better than commercial support a Commercial company may offer.

"So how do I find these Open Source Applications?" Luckily for you, I have been working in this field for several years now, and would like to save you time of searching to find best places to look.

The following list is also available at http://www.webdesignhq.com/portal/ as well as many other links/resources dealing with Open Source Community.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The mother of all open source application search engines is SourceForge.net where most if not all of top projects are located:

http://www.sourceforge.net

Here is a list of top Open Source Web Applications:

CMS - Portals

Drupal - http://www.drupal.org/

eNvolution - http://www.envolution.com/

eZ Publish - http://ez.no/