This morning I found the net all abuzz with news that WordPress has been suspending accounts or deleting blogs created by affiliate marketers. Mind you, this only pertains to FREE blogs. If you’re paying to host a WordPress blog on a server, as I am, you’re not affected.

Still, it’s worth everyone’s paying attention, because it makes a universal point.

When you publish material to the internt, whether it’s a web site, a blog or any other means of distributing digital information across cyberspace, you should always, always, ALWAYS own your primary means of distribution.

And by “own” I mean have it registered in your name, pay a fee for hosting it and have a complete backup of it on your own hard drive. And then copy that backup to a CD and put it in a safe deposit box at your bank. OWN your digital empire!

Because anytime you use any free service, whether it’s free website hosting, or free blog hosting, whether it’s at WordPress or Blogger or MySpace or anywhere else, you have traded FREE for your  FREEdom to say and do anything you like.

Blogger and WordPress don’t allow people to put up blogs for free just to be nice. They do it to earn profits. And they, like any business, will act swiftly to stop anything that they think dampens their profits.

If they decide something you are doing is having a negative impact on their business, they will dump you and all the hard work you’ve put into your publishing-and there’s not a thing you can say or do about it. Why? Because you are a not their client. You are not their business partner. You are a freeloader, and you are expendable.

By the same token, if you have a web site or a blog, and you are paying to host it, be darn sure YOU register your domain names, and YOU set up your hosting account and YOU own a master copy of your web sites or a backup of your blog. It’s OK to hire people to do all sorts of things for you, like design a site and upload it to your server, or install scripts on your site, but YOU should have the ultimate control over everything that happens in your digital domain.

Ever month I hear from at least one person who’s just found out their web site or the blog no longer exists. And the person they were paying to manage their site isn’t answering emails.

And when I ask a few questions, I always find out the owner of the lost blog or web site doesn’t know where their domain name was registered or whose name it’s in. “Well, I assume it’s in my name. It’s has to be, doesn’t it?”

No, sir and mam, it does not.

The biggest mistake you can make is to let someone else do everything to set up your web site or blog, including registering a domain name, build the site, host it and then bill you for monthly maintenance.

Because if these people turn out to be irresponsible, or vindictive, or mentally unstable, or just run into the ordinary trials and tribulations of life that cause people to go out of business, your digital empire-and all the hard work you put into building it-can disappear along with them.

There’s nothing wrong with using free services like Blogger or Squidoo or WordPress or MySpace or Flickr or any of the many, many free means of publishing on the internet. But these should NEVER be the foundation of your online business.

The foundation of your business should be web sites and blogs you OWN and control and back-up regularly. Because then, when something happens to a free site-and it’s just the nature of the internet that something will, eventually, happen-you’ve just lost an outbuilding. You haven’t lost the whole damn farm.

Bonnie Boots publishes  The Internet Wizards Magazine . Explore the magic of making your own products and marketing on the internet. Register for a gift one-year subscription at http://www.theinternetwizards.com