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Make or Break Domains and Web Hosting

BY: Terry Didcott
Words: 895

So you�ve decided to put up your own website, but that�s about as far as your thinking process has gone. It happens to a lot of people, then they have a mad moment of insanity and make the first big mistake that hangs around to haunt them for ages. What are we talking about? Domain names and web hosting are an important part of creating a successful internet business, so it pays to get that part right. Here are some of the things you should do as well as some thing you absolutely should not do when selecting your domain name and web hosting.

Here are two of the positively worst things you can do if you want your business to be taken seriously. One is to set your domain name up with a free hosting company. The second is to get too clever and think up such an esoteric name that no one will know what you site is all about. Let�s take the first one of these points.

Plenty of people who are new to the business will go to something like yahoo and set up an account with geocities or something similar. They end up with a domain name like:

�theirsite.com/yourwebsitename/somethingelse/index.html�

Does it look professional or make anyone want to visit? Not really. To make matters worse, you end up with a load of advertising banners and other rubbish floating around on your homepage that are nothing to do with your business. These free hosting sites are ok if you want to post some pictures of yourself and write some stuff to share with your family and friends, but you want potential customers to take your business seriously. Most won�t even go there if the name looks unprofessional and the ones that do will soon leave if they are bombarded with all sorts of irrelevant advertising. So the best advice is to get professional hosting. You can choose your own domain name that will look something like:

�yourwebsite.com�

That looks better, doesn�t it?

Another important factor in choosing professional hosting over free hosting is the bandwidth and storage space you get. With a free hosting company both of these are severely limited. What do you think will happen when you want to offer big downloads to your customers and you only have 10 megabytes of disk space? That will soon be eaten up and your free hosting company will not give you any more for free.

Should you get lucky and start attracting lots of visitors to your free site, you could start to use up a lot of their total bandwidth. How long do you think they will put up with that before shutting you down? What if the free server goes down and your business goes off the air. Do you think the free hosting company will pull out all the stops to bring it back up quickly?

With a professional hosting company these issues do not exist, as you set out how much disk space and bandwidth you want from the outset. Also, it is in the interests of a professional hosting company to ensure your server is kept up and running. Professional web hosting is so cheap nowadays, with some companies offering packages starting for as little as five to seven dollars per month.

So you can see, it really does pay to get a professional hosting company right from the start. Now we�ll elaborate on the second point.

�What�s in a name?� That saying sticks in a lot of people�s minds when it comes to selecting the domain name of the website that will be the engine of their business. They go ahead and register the first thing they think of because, hey, what�s in a name? Well when it comes to getting visitors to your website there�s a lot of weight given to that name. I�ll show you what I mean.

Say, for example your chosen business will be selling pet accessories. You want people to be able to find you on the search engines then come to your website to buy what you are selling. So it�s no good calling your website something like:

�the-bringer-of-goodly-wares.com�

They won�t know what on earth it�s all about. You need to think of something that is relevant to your business. Choose something like:

�great-pet-accessories.com�.

This would tell potential customers what your site is about so they will want to come and have a look.

Another small but important point is whether or not to use .com. Any potential customer who wants to know about your website will assume it�s a dot com, so if you use any other identifier you�ll find yourself having to explain it while they lose interest and move off to another site. Plenty of people looking for products or services on the internet won�t even visit a site unless it is a dot com!

To be successful in business, there are so many factors to think about and getting it right from the very beginning will pay dividends in the long run. Choosing a good, 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 business.