August 17, 2009
Guidelines for Choosing a Hosting Plan
So you think you want to start up a website. Prior posts from me were about domain name choice and website creation. Next we will discuss hosting: Early on in your decision making process, you will want to shop for a hosting plan.
Once your website has been created, it is time to make it go live on the internet. In order to do so, you will need a hosting plan. By purchasing a domain name you have branded, or named your website. You own the name, but now you must pay rent to someone to actually get your website online. With a hosting plan you will be paying a service provider to publish your website on the internet for all to see. This article covers what to look for in a hosting plan.
SERVICE First and foremost in your decision is to consider the hosting provider’s reputation for it’s services. Bells and whistles and fancy features will do you no good if you can’t get customer service in a timely fashion. After you have published, or “gone live” on the internet, the last thing you want is for the website to go down and become unavailable to potential customers. Strategically the best thing you can do for your website upfront is to choose a hosting company that is reliable in terms of customer service as well as “uptime”.
UPTIME Does the hosting provider you are considering offer an “uptime guarantee? The better hosting providers will offer up to 99% uptime. Even at 99% average uptime it can mean that your website will be off the internet for over 7 hours per month. If at all possible, choose a host guaranteeing up to 99.9% uptime.
SIZE How large is your site? One of the determining factors for the price of most hosting plans is the amount of space required to store the website on their server’s hard drive. Most websites do not require much space but if you’re planning on having a large site with a lot of multimedia content or an ecommerce site selling multiple items, you’ll probably need additional disk space on your hosting plan.
LINUX OR WINDOWS This question refers to the operating systems available for hosting and which one to choose. This question has no relevance to the brand of operating system you are using on your computer. What programming language was used in the Web site design? For example, if you designed a website using ASP or ASP.NET, you’ll need to find a Windows hosting plan. If you have a Web site that uses CGI or PHP, you’ll need to get a Linux hosting plan. Note that if you are simply publishing a basic html website, the choice of hosting Operating system won’t really matter as much until you get into more advanced languages such as PHP or ASP.
TRAFFIC How much traffic or how many visitors do you expect monthly? Most hosting providers sell their hosting plans on a sliding scale according to bandwith usage. The more visitors or traffic you expect on your site, the higher the bandwidth you will need, and the more the plan will cost. The best advice here is to start off with a low cost, low bandwidth plan and upgrade it later as the traffic to your website grows.
SHARED OR DEDICATED HOSTING The question of shared vs. dedicated hosting is really answered in a very simple way: First a brief description of shared hosting, which is sharing space on a server with dozens or perhaps hundreds of other websites. The main factor here is that you will have no control over the operating system, database structure, etc., and will have to work within the structure setup by the hosting provider. Using dedicated (or virtual dedicated) hosting means that you have full control over the server your website is stored on and that only your data occupies the space on that server. Dedicated server hosting gives you full control over setup of the operating system and auxilliary programs such as database management or shopping cart or database management software. Generally customer support will be low to non-existent, since this type of hosting is geared to the advanced user who will be using his own custom setup. The bottom line: start off with shared hosting if you are a beginner, until you are advanced enough to progress to your own controlled dedicated hosting environment.
At StartYourWebsiteToday.com I offer 99.9% guaranteed uptime and offer customer service 24/7. We also have a selection of shared, dedicated, and virtual dedicated hosting plans to suit all budgets and sizes and types of websites. To see what is available, click HERE: Hosting plans.
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A crucial building block in setting up a website is the choice of a domain name. Whether you are a butcher, baker, or candlestick maker, or if you want to start up a website to advertise your garage band, the entire endeavor begins with the choice of a domain name.
Then again you might ask- “What determines a good domain name choice?”. There are various factors to take into consideration. What I mean by that is if your site is just going to be devoted to family photos and events, domain name choice isn’t as important as it might be otherwise. Why not? Because in a case like that you probably don’t really care about gaining a lot of traffic to your website, friends and family are your desired visitors, to let them know about the latest goings on. In a case like this, it does not matter whatsoever if you find a domain name like “ourdogspot.com” or not, since most likely you will only be giving out the website address to a few friends and family and maybe Aunt Tilly in Toledo.
The point is that in a case like this, there is no real concern with getting a lot of visitors to the website other than friends and family and coworkers, so there is no real harm in naming the website ANYTHING, because you will be giving out the website address to a select few people. BUT……
What if you want as much traffic to your website as possible? What if you are looking for business on the internet?
The simple answer is, it can bring huge dividends to have a domain name that drives traffic to your website or company. If your website is about car parts for example, do you really expect the average web surfer to remember how to get to your website if it is named “bobsthingsforsale.com” or some other unrelated name? If you can, get your domain name exactly the same as your business, that is your best bet. Failing that, at least try to put the category of your business into the name. For example, an antiques website should have a domain name like antiques.com or bobsantiques.com, something that immediately associates the domain name with the theme of the site. It’s all about branding, and making a lasting impression on the target audience or customers.
You can find domain names by checking the WhoIs database on the internet. To aid you in your domain name search, I have conveniently placed a domain name search engine on StartYourWebsiteToday.com for this very purpose. After searching for the domain name, the results given will instantly show whether or not the domain name is available, and if so, give you the option to immediately register it. If it’s not available, several alternative domain names will be proposed, to help you fine tune your search, or possibly giving you an acceptable alternative domain name to register instead.
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This series of posts is for the person asking “How do I start my own website?”. To begin with: What do you want your website to portray? Thoughtful consideration of your website’s future direction will help you in deciding on the optimum domain name for your site. Just as important as choosing the name for your business, a domain name, the name of your soon-to-be website, is one of the most important factors in your online success. Ultimately you are seeking to attract customers- the Holy Grail, and good marketing (which will help with Search Engine placement also) begins with your choice of domain name.
What if someone else already owns the domain name you wanted? But you really wanted it badly. Can the domain name still be acquired? Maybe. It’s possible, but there are some things to consider. With some research and hard work you can get the domain name you want even if it is already spoken for. Instead, let’s check out some alternative strategies to get the domain name you want:
Hyphenated Names Sometimes it is a good strategy to just take the same domain name and hyphenate it as in turning bobsautoparts.com into bobs-auto-parts.com. Is it always the best strategy? Yes and no. If you want a domain name that is already taken by someone else and is already a well known, well traveled website, this might be a bad move, because users already familiar with the original domain name will just type the original, non-hyphenated version into their web browser, and end up not at your site but at your competitor’s site. Not the desired result! Word to the wise: keep the domain name as short as possible. The longer the name, especially with dashes in between words, the more likely that potential visitors to your site will enter it incorrectly into their browsers, thus foiling the chances of them visiting your website and costing you customers! So, the shorter the better. Another school of thought: IF the web domain you want is already taken, IF the owner of the domain name won’t give it up, and IF the website associated with it is non-existent or poorly designed with low traffic, hyphenating the name might make sense after all. But be careful: the last thing you want is to cause internet domain name confusion because you have decided on a domain name registration that is so close to a major competitor’s name that you end up losing business to them.
Longer or Shorter? If you want to, you can purchase up to a 67 character long domain name. You could purchase a domain name like thelongestdomainnameintheworldandthensome
andthensomemoreandmore.com which is 63 characters long, but why would you want to do that? Can you envision anyone wanting to type it into their browser? My website is www.StartYourWebsiteToday.com and has a domain name that tells what kind of website you will be surfing to. Good name selection can be helpful also with search engine ranking. You will want to definitely keep the name as short and sweet as possible, but at the same time let the visitor know what to expect when he surfs to your website. Shorter is better here.
Brand Name or Generic Whether or not to call your website by a brand name or to make the name a more generic description of your business online is the question. Definitely if your business is known by a fairly well known brand name, then you would want to try and secure that as your domain name. For instance, Nike.com is a well known brand name site, although there is nothing in the domain name to suggest that it is a site about shoes. Still, Nike is such a well known brand name to the public that people automatically know what they will be shopping for when they get there. If your brand name is well known, definitely try to obtain your brand name as a domain name. But if your company is Nike or Coca Cola or Budweiser don’t discount the idea of buying the domain name shoes.com or soda.com or beer.com if they are available as well. People often search the web using generic terms, more so even than brand names. A person is more likely to search the internet with generic terms like shoes or footwear or sneakers than to search by a single brand name, even one as big as Nike. Research your domain name as thoroughly as you can, including looking for generic keywords which could be a good fit as a potential domain name. You can have as many domain names as you want pointing to a single website, so the more generic terms you can acquire that directly describe your business, the better. A generic name if your business is new or not yet well known can get great results, if you can find a good one. To start your search for your own unique domain name, here is a link to a domain name search engine. So in conclusion, the first step in “how to start a website” is in the wise choice of your domain name.
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Filed under Computer News & Reviews, Useful & Latest Computer Software by softwaredudette