Domains and hosting for small business

Domain Name
A domain name is the actual address used by your site visitors to find your website, and can be used to configure email accounts. Typically a domain would look like http://www.yourname.url. URL or URI are terms that are used interchangeably with domain.

Registering your domain name is easy, your ISP might be able to do it, or you could use your credit card and register your domain through one of the many budget domain resellers. Every country has its own top level domain, .co.uk for UK residents, .de for German residents etc. Its important to determine your current and potential market before you register your domain name if you're in business. Any domain name will get indexed by search engines, and you'll be found regardless of the top level domain you use, but be aware that your customers may have a preference for dealing with a local company.

Your domain name says something about you or your business and you never actually own it, all you ever do is pay an annual registration fee to secure rights to the name. Forget to pay the fee and you'll lose those rights so please make a note of the expiry date in your calendar and make sure you renew your registration before your domain expires.

When it comes to selecting your domain, there seem to be a couple of different schools of thought, on one hand you have those who say the domain should match your business name, others say you should select a name that includes your industry group or major product type. Whichever way you go, just realise that by and large you're stuck with the name once you've got it. Personally I use my name, and my recommendation to you is to pick the name that is going to give you the best results. If your small business website is designed to support existing real world customers then use your name. If you plan to extend your customer base from your website then search engines may provide good traffic, and in this case you might like to consider the second option.

Webhosting
Just having a domain names isn't sufficient, you also need a server to house your website. Most small business owners should not consider using their own office servers connected to the Net through a broadband connection. Unless you are very confident of your abilities to secure your data you are far better off paying a few dollars a month to have your site hosted by a third party.

Choosing your webhost can be difficult, not least because there are so many vying for your attention and words are cheap. My advice, ask around, find out which host provider your business colleagues use. Getting stuck with a lemon could be a disaster waiting to happen.

Now here's another thought, if you're going to follow my advice and create your small business website yourself, you'll need to make sure the hosting account you pay for will let you do what needs to be done. I use Serendipity in my websites, so my hosting accounts need to be linux based, I usually like to have at least 200mb of data storage, and at least 5Gb of monthly traffic. I also need access to MySQL databases. I suggest you look for the same.

I hope this short article is useful to you, and if you have a recomendation for a rock solid domain registrar or webhost company please feel free to share by posting a comment. These are moderated.