Domain Names
When you set up your website, you need a domain name. You’ll need to find a suitable domain name and register it before you start. This is what a domain name looks like — www.MyWidgets.com. You can choose a dot com name, or .net, .biz, .tv, .mobi etc. Most marketers will suggest to use a .com name if possible for a business.

Many websites own more than one domain name and point the extra domain names to the website. The reason for this is to make it easier to find your website, even with a typo for example.

So what’s a good domain name? That really depends on what you’re doing online and how you’re doing your marketing. How are you planning to have your clients find you? If you’re a retailer and you send your clients to your website through advertising in your store, on your business card, in your print advertising etc. you probably want a easy to remember name for your customers. Let’s say you’re selling widgets, maybe www.Mywidgets.com would be a good name for you – or www.WidgetsGalore.com if that’s the name of your store.

If you’re going after search engine traffic you want to use your keyword phrase in your domain name. So then www.Luxury-Widgets.com might be appropriate.
Domain names are similar to real estate in that domain names are virtual properties on the internet. You use the domain name to build your website on – just like a house is built on a lot. The highest quality domain names are sought-after just like waterfront property, and they carry significant value. This is why you want to make sure you have your name on the domain name registration, just like you would have your name on the title of your house. This way you will get notified when your domain name is about to expire for example. Many businesses have lost their domain names because they simply didn’t understand that they had to keep track of their asset and left it in the hands of a web designer instead. Once the web designer leaves, nobody has passwords, or log ins, or even a receipt of ownership to the domain name.
So, how do you register your domain? Well, there are plenty of places you can go to to register a domain name. Here are a few examples:
www.GoDaddy.com
www.1&1.com
www.register.com

HOSTING
You also need to consider hosting. Where are you going to host your website? We prefer usually recommend using a big hosting company like 1&1.com or GoDaddy,com, just because it’s easy and reliable. They have tech support 24-7 and guaranteed uptime. This means that your website will not go down due to problems with the host. In the early days of the internet, many smaller web design firms hosted website on their own servers. This sometimes meant that the server would shut down due to a virus attack or some sort of technical issue, which could be devastating to business. Nowadays hosting is not a large cost. It’s usually inexpensive to host your website, most of your monthly fees will be related to the e-commerce part of your website (such as shopping cart, payment gateway and payment processing fees). But we’re getting way ahead of ourselves. Let’s back up to hosting.

I usually think of hosting as parking. Basically you rent a space in the parking garage for your website where it can reside. You want to use a large parking garage to ensure that your pass code always works and that there’s security so that nothing happens to your car. You want security cameras, and a guard onsite 24-7. You pay a monthly fee for your space.
The parking garage can be compared to a server. A server is really nothing but a super-computer, and in this case it’s used as a container for websites. When we speak of servers in the web world, it sounds as if these are magic devices floating around in cyberspace. Many web designers, or other businesses, rent space on someone else’s server for storage. Sometimes they’ll rent the whole server, sometimes just a part of it. They can upload large amounts of information to this server for storage, but now I’m getting off track again. Let’s get back to our hosting.
As a website owner, you don’t want to have to deal with maintenance of the parking garage. You want to be able to sleep at night and not have to worry about if someone is breaking in to the parking garage to steal cars, or if the light bulbs needs changing, or the floor swept. This is what we pay hosting for. We let the experts handle this part. Trust me, they have all the necessary tools for the job – the fancy security cameras, the armed guards and the floor sweeping mobile.