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Best FREE Experts' Tips on How to Choose Best Domain Name Registrar and Website Hosting Companies
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Learn from experienced people. Get quick tips from experts. Don't risk yourself and be disappointed later. There are actually several important steps to consider when choosing a web hosting company. It is important to carefully choose a good company that is able to offer all the features required by a Webmaster / business owner.
Be patient. Don't be impulsive and make decision hastily. Do not be tempted in selecting a company purely on the 'cheapest' or simply 'best' price. Today hosting is cheap and the competition is strong to attract new customers like yourself.
Do some basic research with independent reviews of hosting companies you are interested in. See what type of reviews they have, paying special attention to their performance. How much time were they off the air off for example? Look for their uptime figures. Do a comparison with several companies. Check out forums to see if there are complaints from users after buying certain services from the said company.
How easy is it to get support from them? Many web hosting companies now have instant messenger service, which can offer instant answers to simple problems as well as phone, email and fax, but normally receiving answers from these methods will be slower. Fast support is important.
It's no good having a hosting company that when a problem arises takes days to respond. Choosing the right company can make the difference between a successful partnership and serious problems if there are always faults.
Look at the features of the web hosting company, do they offer all the most common functions required?
How easy is it to use the features? Many companies offer cpanel and Fantastico, which makes adding new items to websites very easy. Be sure to investigate the features offered. Check how much disk space and bandwidth is being offered.
Check how many domains can be hosted on one account, some companies allow one domain, others allow 10 domains and some have unlimited domain hosting.
Most people start with a small hosting plan, make sure it is easy to upgrade to a larger plan if required. Some hosting plans have limited options for upgrading.
It is normally advisable to register a domain name with one company and then transfer the domain name to the hosting company. This is very easy and is only a question of directing the domain to the hosting company domain name server. They will tell you how to do this.
The reason to have a domain name registered independently from the hosting company is that it makes it easier to transfer to a new host if required.
Some of the cheaper hosting companies offer a free domain name, but it is very important to make sure this name is registered in your name in the Whois database, which registers details of the owners of domains. Sometimes companies can try to make you stay with their hosting plan with this free domain offer.
If you build a business, but are unhappy with the service offered, it is essential to be able to transfer quickly to a new hosting company.
Try to find a host that allows monthly payments, so that in the event that the service is poor or any other reason that makes a transfer necessary, a year's payment hasn't been wasted.
Most of the very basic hosting plans will only allow a yearly payment, but for anything else try to go for monthly billing.
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How to get the Best Domain Name
What is a domain name?
A domain name is the location of your website on the Internet. Your domain
name will be what you become known by online so it's important to get it right.
Each website on the Internet is labelled with something called an IP address which is the actual address of the website online. A typical IP address looks like this: 159.134.27.64. Remembering a string of numbers like that is difficult so a domain name translates all those numbers into something like www.amazon.com. This is far easier to remember.
1. Dot what?
Each domain has what's called an extension. The most well known of these extensions is .com. This, however, is not the only type of domain extension available. There is also:
.net
If you can't find your preferred .com domain name you could always choose the same domain with a .net extension. It might not have the same ring as a .com but is still as just useful as a .com.
.org
These domain extensions were orginally designed for educational and more formal websites. Anybody can register a .org however so you have more options for domain selection.
.info
A more recent introduction to the domain name game are .info domains. Many of the valuable .info domains were bought up overnight but there's still a huge range of good .info domains available. With a little creativity you could really make a .info work for you e.g. www.moviereview.info.
Bear in mind that most web surfers tend to remember .com more easily than anything else.
2. Branding vs Business Name
There is an age old debate on the whether or not you should establish a brand name online or use a domain that more actually reflects your real business. Let's look at Amazon as an example. Amazon sells books online. Most people setting up a business would have chosen say www.booksonline.com instead of www.amazon.com. Amazon has since established itself as a brand name of global recognition - proving the value of building a brand name.
You'll need to choose between the two. Brand name or your own business name. Consider how your domain sounds, how it might look on a business card and how well it relates to your business.
There's no one right answer to this question. You need to choose what makes most sense for you, your website and your business in general.
3. Hyphenated or Not?
This is another area of debate. Should your domain be one single word or should the words be separated by hyphens? There are advantages and disadvantages to both approaches. Single word domain names can be easier to explain, use on header paper and lend themselves to brand names very well.
Single word domains are in very, very short supply.
Hyphenated domains names can be slighltly more difficult to explain, may not look as well on headed paper and possibly harder to establish as a brand name. There's no shortage of multiple word domains.
The single biggest advantage a hyphenated domain has is that searche engines can "read" the domain more easily. For example in a domain like www.foreignholidaysonline.com the search engine can only read the first word "foreign" and that's it. It can't tell anything else about the website domain name.
If you hyphenated that to www.foreign-holidays-online.com the search engine can read "foreign", "holidays" and "online" as separate words and therefore knows that this website is about foreign holidays.
A well chosen hyphenated domain name can be just as effective as a single word domain name.
Having said this, buy domain names with and without hyphens if you have sufficient budget.
4. Your Domain Registrar
These are the people you pay to register the domain for you. There are dozens if not hundreds of these companies out there so which one do you choose? This takes some research but things worth checking are:
- Do you retain sole ownership of the domain or do the registrar keep some level of control over it?
- Search Google for any horror stories relating to the registrar
- Does the registrar allow you to transfer the domain to another registrar?
- Is there an online control panel for domain administration?
- How easy is it to change the domain Name Servers?
Shop around for domain registrars. What you really want to find is a previously satisfied customer to ask questions before you buy.
5. Cheap Domain Names
You can save a lot of money on the domain names you purchase. A typical .com domain costs about $15 to register from most registrars. However you can get the same domain for as little as $7.95 from other, very reliable, companies.
Oddly enough some of the cheaper domain registrars are more reliable, have fewer horror stories and offer equally good customer service as their more expensive competitors.
Are there any disadvantages in using a discount domain registrar? Will it affect your website in any way? The answer to both is a definite No.
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