Domain Names and Hosting
In the sixth of our series of informative articles on the honest way to earn an income online, we look at Domain names and Hosting.
You want your own website but are not sure what to call it or where to host it. Find out the dos and don'ts of domains and web hosting.
Domain names and web hosting are two very important parts of creating a successful internet business. It pays to get that part right from the outset. We'll look at some of the things you should do as well as some thing you should not do when choosing your domain name and your web hosting.
Be Taken Seriously
If you want your business to be taken seriously there are two things you should not do. One is to set your domain name up with a free hosting company. The other is to get clever and invent a domain name so esoteric that no one will know what you site is about. We'll look at hosting first.
When people are new to the business they are likely to look at free hosting to keep costs down. Something like yahoo with its free hosting arm geocities is a popular first choice. The problem is they end up with a domain name something like:
www.theirsite.com/theirwebsitename/whateverelse/index.html
Do you think it looks professional or makes anyone fall over themselves to visit? Not really. To make matters worse, they end up with a ton of irrelevant banners and other rubbish on their homepage that are nothing to do with their business.
These free hosting sites are fine if you want to post pictures of yourself and write some stuff to share with your friends and family. But you want to attract potential customers who will take your business seriously. Most people won't bother with a site if the name looks unprofessional.
Others don't appreciate being bombarded with all sorts of irrelevant advertising and soon leave. So the best advice is to get professional hosting. You get to choose your own domain name and it will look something like:
"yourwebsite.com"
Now doesn't that look more professional?
Sizing
Bandwidth and storage space are important factors in choosing professional over free hosting. With free hosting, these are severely limited. What do you imagine will happen when you want to offer lots of downloads and you only have 20mb of disk space to play with? That'll soon be gone and do you think a free hosting company will want to give you more for free?
What if your free server goes down for any length of time and takes your business off the air. Do you think they'll pull out all the stops to get it up quickly?
I once used free hosting many years ago and the server went down for a few days. Luckily for me, it was only a personal site, but what if it had been my business? How many customers might I have lost to the guy with the professionally hosted website in those few days? Let me tell you, consumers are fickle animals and won't hesitate to switch loyalties if they need a product fast and the site they normally use is not available.
What if you are lucky enough to attract lots of visitors to your free site? One thing that'll happen is you'll start to use too much of their total bandwidth and they won't like it. The next thing that will happen is they'll just shut you down.
With a good professional hosting company, these issues just do not exist. You choose the package that specifies how much disk space and bandwidth you estimate you'll need and you can always upgrade with no loss of service. More importantly, a professional hosting company will guarantee to ensure your server is kept running for almost all of the time. To top it all off. professional web hosting has become relatively cheap these days.
Hostgator
This site is currently hosted elsewhere, but a couple of years ago it was hosted with HostGator, who offer unlimited domain hosting for a very reasonable montly outlay. That means you can host 100 domains if you want all for the same single fee.
Note: As a Hostgator affiliate I earn from qualifying purchases
They also guarantee the server will be up 99.9% of the time. You can find out more about hostgator discount codes and coupons here: http://hostgatorcouponsave.blogspot.com. If you are looking for a good professional host, you can do a lot worse than HostGator.
If you have a mind to own multiple websites and intend to use some as network sites to provide links to your main money-making sites (some call this a link farm or private blog network PBN) it pays to host these additional sites at different hosts to create the situation where they don't all come from the same place. There are plenty of alternative hosting companies out there that provide a good service for less outlay. Let's look at some of the best of these:
Hawk Host
Another great hosting company that costs less when you sign up for a whole year at a time is Hawk Host. This is a good choice for a secondary hosting provider and one I use personally.
Note: As a HawkHost affiliate I earn from qualifying purchases
Hawkhost uses Lightspeed servers so websites load up fast and they're very reliable with good customer support. Click that link to check out Hawk Host.
So I think I've rammed the point home well enough. Get a professional hosting company - it pays dividends. Now it's time to elaborate on that second point.
Domain Name Relevance
"What's in a name?" Indeed. That's a saying that creeps into a lot of people's minds when they decide to select their domain name. The one that will identify the website that will be the central engine of their entire internet business. They go ahead like a bull in a china shop and register the first great name they come up with. After all, hey, what's in a name? When it comes to attracting visitors to your website there's an enormous amount of weight in that name. What do I mean by that?
Let's say, for example you have chosen your niche market to be children's clothes. Now, people have to be able to find you on the search engines, so there's no point in calling your website something like:
www.wonderouslyshinythingsforyou.com
They won't have a clue what it's about. You have to think of a name that is relevant to your niche business. Much better to choose something like:
www.childrensclothes.com
I doubt that name is still available, but you get the idea. The right name will tell your potential customers exactly what your site is all about so they'll want to come and have a look.
Another important point is the use of .com as a suffix. In my humble opinion, you should always use .com for any internet based business as it says that you are professional. Any other suffix will do, of course, but when people talk about website domain names, they invariably end the name with dot com. It has become the standard brand name for an online business. Just like people refer to a vacuum cleaner as a hoover, or a ball point pen as a biro, an internet business is a DOT COM. So do yourself a favour and be known as www. yoursite.com.
Getting things right from the very beginning will pay dividends for your online business in the long run. Choosing a good, solid, professional hosting company and a sensible, relevant domain name for your website not only makes a lot of sense, it could make or break your online business.
In the next article in the series, we'll be looking at some of the reasons internet marketers fail.
NEXT ARTICLE #7 >> Why You Will Fail Part 1
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