Posts Tagged ‘domain name’

Website checklist: Four things you need

Monday, August 31st, 2009

There are some main ingredients and some optional parts to getting a website up and running. This article will discuss what you absolutely need for internet users to actually find you on the world wide web. Main components are having a domain name and web hosting for your files, the actual physical files like HTML, that make up the design of the page and the option to secure your content against non encrypted attacks. Let’s take a look.

Registering a Domain Name

When starting up your website, you need a domain name to help people remember how to get to your site. A memorable domain name is something like google.com, which everyone knows. When starting out, you may want to look into some companies offering you to purchase cheap domain names to start your web business. Their features are quite similar to the bigger companies, if not the same, and are a great cost effective solution.

Web Site Hosting

You need a location to store your web site files. If you have an image, a PDF file or flash presentation, for others to see it, there has to be a location always ready to show those files. This is where an affordable web hosting solution comes into play. For a relatively inexpensive price of less than five to ten dollars a month you can get your web files hosted for others to see.

Web Site Design

The web site is comprised of files, including HTML files, Image files, Videos or Flash. A web developer can create this for you or you will do it yourself. The better the skills of the person doing it, the better your site will look like. You can use tools like Dreamweaver or other web hosting sitebuilders to create your site. Again, quality is directly in relation to the tools used and skill level of the person doing it.

Secure Hosting (Optional)

Many sites use a brochure style setup with static data, so the need for optional secured hosting is not a requirement. If your site is collecting information such as credit card data, then you will need to looking into buying ssl certificate for your website to ensure your visitors data is protected. The data is protected by a web server certificate that changes your site from http to https, indicating to the user it is secure. The https is what makes the data encrypted when sent over the internet so people cannot abuse the information being transmitted. For these sites, you definately need it, but not for regular information web sites or blogs.

Those are four basics you need to start any web site and will get you started. You then need to decide what additional components you may need to also include in your web site package.

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How to Choose a Hosting Plan for Your Site

Tuesday, June 16th, 2009

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:  One of the critical decisions you will have to make is what type of hosting plan to use and what hosting provider to choose.

Once you have created the pages for your website, now you want to publish it to the internet.  To have your website seen on the internet you will need to choose a hosting plan.  A hosting plan is different from a domain name.  You own your domain name but you rent a hosting plan.  With a hosting plan you will be paying a service provider to publish your website on the internet for all to see.  Let’s go over some of the key important factors to consider when choosing a hosting plan:

SERVICE  The most important consideration is the level of service provided.  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.  Therefore should a problem occur it is important to select a hosting provider that is readily available and will resolve the issue in as timely a manner as possible.

UPTIME  What is the hosting company’s “uptime guarantee”? Many guarantee 99% uptime for their servers.  That sounds great, but it does mean that your site could go down for 1% of the time, which means over 7 hours out of each month! The best hosting providers will have a track record of up to 99.9% uptime, which essentially guarantees you that downtime is negligible or even non-existent.

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.  If your website will be media rich with videos or music or photo files, or a large e-commerce site with a lot of catalogue pages, you will have to take space into consideration as a criteria for choosing the right 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.  The determining factor here is what programming language was used to design the website.  For example, if CGI or PHP programming language was used, the best choice for the hosting operating system would be Linux.  For a website designed with ASP, the best choice would be Windows.  For the novice user who is building a simple html website the above may not be a consideration at first, but may become important later on as you become more experienced and add more features to your website.

TRAFFIC  Will you be expecting lots of visitors to your website?  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.  Dedicated or virtual dedicated hosting is different in the sense that you will have full control over the environment that your website resides in, and you will have the only access to that space.  In other words, you would determine what operating system to use, what type database management software, what type of blog software, what type shopping cart, etc., etc.  This type of hosting is definitely geared to the more advanced user, and usually you won’t be able to get as much customer support because it will be a 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 StartMyWebsiteToday.com our uptime guarantee is 99.9% and we offer 24/7 customer service.  The hosting plans that are offered include a variety: shared hosting, virtual dedicated hosting, and dedicated hosting plans with either Linux or Windows operating systems for every need and budget ranging from the small personal website to large online multimedia sites to those interested in ecommerce website building. To review the options we offer, click HERE: Hosting plans.

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Traffic To Your Website Begins With Domain Name Choice

Wednesday, May 27th, 2009

So you want to start up a website?  One of the best things you can help yourself with in your domain name choice is to develop a strategy and plan of attack.  A well chosen domain is a key component to your website’s success. Hopefully at this stage of the game you already know that Search Engine placement is critical to getting visitors to your website.  Among other factors, the domain name you choose will help you in getting to the “top of the charts”.

What if someone already owns the domain name you covet?  Would it still be possible to buy the domain name?  Maybe.  It’s possible, but there are some things to consider.  With some research and hard work you can possibly obtain the name from the current domain name owner.  Instead, let’s check out some alternative strategies to get the domain name you want:

Hyphenated Names One strategy to consider if the domain name you want is already taken would be to hyphenate it, as in turning ricksantiqueshop.com into ricks-antique-shop.com.  Is hyphenating the best way to go?  Yes and no.  For example, if the domain name you want is already taken AND well known, most likely this is not a good idea, because most web surfers would likely just type the non-hyphenated version into their browsers and thus could end up at your competitor’s website.  Not a good strategy.  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 keep it short.  But if the name you have chosen is already taken and there is no chance of getting it from it’s owner, and the owner either has no website or a poorly designed one with little traffic, this can be a good strategy in purchasing a name.

Longer or Shorter?  You can purchase domain names up to 67 characters in length.  You could purchase a domain name like thelongestdomainnameintheworldandthensome
andthensomemoreandmore.com which is 63 characters long, but why would you want to do that?  Who would want to type it into a browser?  My website is www.StartMyWebsiteToday.com    When choosing my domain name I wanted something that in a few words would tell the web surfer what to expect from my website.  Good name selection can be helpful also with search engine ranking.  When choosing your domain name try to keep it short and concise, and if at all possible let the name tell the story of the site.  Shorter is better here.

Brand Name or Generic  Should you give your website a descriptive generic name or do you want to use a brand name?  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.  Budweiser.com is a site that is well known and gets a lot of traffic, even though there is nothing specifically in the domain name that says anything about beer.  But because Budweiser is known all over the world as a beer brand, people know what they are getting when they surf to the website.  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.

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