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For newbies on the web, the question is “How do I start my own website?”.  First:  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.  Careful consideration of your website’s domain name can pay off in dividends once your website is published online. Fine tuning your choice and thinking it through will help secure good placement with search engines and in the minds of your potential visitors/customers.

OK, so now you’ve found the domain name you want, but someone else owns it.  Is it still possible to buy it?  Possibly.  It’s possible, but with conditions 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 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 hyphenating the best way to go?  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 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.  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?  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?  Can you envision anyone wanting to type it into their browser?  My website is www.StartYourWebsiteToday.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.  In as few characters as possible the name of the site, the purpose of the site, and the keywords of the site have all been neatly put together in a domain name.  Remember, keep it short!

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.  So if possible cover all the bases.  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.  Bottom line, the beginning phase of how to start your own website is choosing the right domain name. 

Selecting a hosting plan is a critical step when you want to start up a website.  Prior posts from me were about domain name choice and website creation.  Now let’s talk a little about hosting:  Choosing a hosting plan is a primary step in launching your fledgling web presence.

Once you have created the pages for your website, now you want to publish it to the internet.  Publishing to the internet involves getting 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  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.  For that reason you want to be sure and choose a hosting provider that will provide the best uptime as well the best availability and quality of customer service.

UPTIME  Does the hosting provider you are considering offer an “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  What size, or how many pages will the website have?  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.  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  How much traffic or how many visitors do you expect monthly?  Hosting plans are usually sold at different level plans according to the bandwith that will be required.  Bandwidth = Traffic.  Obviously more bandwidth is better because it allows more visitors to visit your site, but at the beginning this will be hard for you to gauge.  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  Whether or not to choose shared hosting over dedicated hosting comes down to the following:  A shared hosting plan is exactly as it sounds, and means that your website will be stored on a server along with lots of other websites.  In this hosting format you generally have no ability to make changes to the resident software on the system, meaning you cannot change or upgrade the operating system, or the database management system, etc.  You will have to work within the software structure provided by the hosting company.  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.  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 StartYourWebsiteToday.com our uptime guarantee is 99.9% and we offer 24/7 customer service.  We also have a selection of shared, dedicated, and virtual dedicated hosting plans to suit all budgets and sizes and types of websites. To review the options we offer, click HERE: Hosting plans.

Webhosting free is a service provided by webhosting companies that allows web sites to be uploaded or transferred to a server for worldwide access entirely free of charge. You can avail of this free webhosting over some sites, the most popular ones include FBhosting, Xoom, Hypermart and GeoCities. Webhosting free services can afford to offer service for free because they can generate profit in the following ways:  placing banner ads on the user’s website, placing banner ads on the administration pages, sending users email from advertisers, generate more visits to the homepage URL given, members sometimes upgrade to paid hosting and they can cobrand webhosting free.

In choosing the best webhosting free service, you need to know what features you actually need for your website.  You can use power search and choose only the features you need. Webhosting free services impose different rules when it comes to setting up your account. Some allow users to get an actual domain name. Mostly, require a sub-domain under a primary domain, i.e. http://geocities/ctibene/… Some webhosting companies allow their users to run CGI scripts.  In others this feature is prohibited.

All webhosting free services offers limited disk space between 5-10 MB only.  They are strict about data transfer also. You must at least be aware of the number of users who will access your website.  This way you can gage the data transfer requirements in your website. Webhosting free providers rarely, if ever, give 24/7 customer support.  Webhosting free services do not have the staffs to attend to the users’ technical problems as hiring more staffs could mean additional expenses for them.  Most webhosting free providers do not guarantee uptime. Most paid webhosting guarantees 99% uptime. Uptime guarantee is important for those who are into business and who rely on the internet to advertise or promote their products and services. Since downtime usually means no business could be conducted at all. Webhosting free services oftentimes do not assist the user in securing a domain name.

Webhosting free oftentimes leave you to your own resources. Usually they do not offer e-commerce solution such as shopping cart, email listing and credit card which are necessary for online business transactions. Webhosting free also imposed limitations when it comes to using your own CGI scripts.  They also have limits on the disk space. You need to check the disk space limits before you put up your website for webhosting free to make sure that the disk space could accommodate your website. In some cases, you need to expand or add more features, the disk space would be enough to accomodate it.

For those people who are novice to hosting or are using the hosting site for a temporary storage of their files, webhosting free is a better alternative. If you are putting up an individual site and if the domain name matters more to you than the simple features of free hosting service, then webhosting free is more to your liking. Otherwise, find a paid webhosting providers for your website.