• Go for your brand name. If yourbusinessname.com is available, register it right away. If there are any common misspellings of your business name, grab those as well, so you will not loose any “misspelled traffic”. That will pretty much end your domain name search. Lucky you. The rest of us, onward!
• Plan B: go for keyword(s) in your domain. It might give your site a little advantage in attracting traffic. Brainstorm the words you’d like to rank well for on search engines, then use a thesaurus to find even more. Now see if you can make a unique and memorable domain without going overboard with everykeywordunderthesuninyourdomain.com. There are better ways to use keywords in your website address.
• Keep it short. It will be easier to type and will allow for more of your page’s URL show up on the search engine results pages and that’s a good thing.
• Look for a .com domain. Generally, it is the best to have a domain name that ends with .com. Most people take it for granted that your domain name will have .com at the end. Even a non-profit organization (where .org is common), or an Internet business (.net can work) can leak a lot of traffic to its .com equivalent.
• Avoid dashes and numbers. Dashes in a domain name look spammy and so can numbers. They also require additional instructions to a prospect over the phone on how to spell it. But if done right, even this rule could be bent: 72andsunny.com works quite well.
• Avoid tricky spelling. A greatdeal.com will beat gr8deal.com any day. Again, Flickr is a lucky exception to the rule. Or maybe they just had a bigger budget for educating people how to properly misspell the word.
• Avoid trendy names. Remember Y2K and all those companies with 2000 in their names? Don’t make the same mistake. And del.icio.us worked because it was original and had a tech-savvy target audience. Unless you can somehow top that, you’ll be seen as another knock-off.
• Make sure domain has clean history. If a domain has been used for spamming in the past, it will be blacklisted by search engines and will be useless if search engine rankings are important to you. Use WayBackMachine and DomainTools for your research.
• Register for as long as you can. Registrars give some discount for longer registration periods, but more importantly, it will be seen by search engines (especially by Google) as a sign of legitimacy of your business. Makes sense.
• Register directly through a registrar. You can search for a domain name in many places online, but go directly to a reputable registrar when you’re ready to buy. Don’t register it through your ISP or a web hosting company - you’ll save yourself a lot of headache down the road. I have been using GoDaddy for severals years now without any problems.

With enough perseverance, good luck, and this advice in mind you will choose a great domain name, I’m sure.

Every website hosting plan comes with at least a few email addresses. You should set up something like you@yourcompany.com and start using that instead of your old you587@earthlink.com. If this is not a self-evident truth for you, here are a few reasons:

• you@yourcompany.com is much more professional then you587@earthlink.com.
• Every time you send an email, its recipient is exposed to your website address and might visit it.
• Even if they don’t check out your website then and there, they are more likely to remember it when they’ll need it.
• When a prospective client requests some info, s/he will be expecting a reply from someone@yourcompany.com, not from some generic or unknown domain. Your reply will not be deleted and you will not loose a sale.
• Your email address will not change even if you change your ISP. As long as you’ll have a website, you will have you@yourcompany.com address.
• If you give email address to all your employees, even those who normally don’t get one, it will multiply your website promotion efforts even more. Especially beneficial if your company sells directly to consumers.
• If you still insist on using your old email address, you can set up your email at yourcompany.com to automatically forward incoming mail to your old address. Most website hosts have an easy to use control panel to accomplish these kind of tasks.
• You are already paying for it, you might as well use it.

Granted, this simple promotional technique will not overwhelm your website with traffic, but it requires no extra effort and the benefits are too many to pass it.

To simplify it greatly, a domain name is a website’s address. Domain names work kind of like an address forwarding service - when people type your domain name into a web browser (ex.: google.com), they areautomatically directed to your website server. Thanks to domain names, we can easily remember google.com, instead of trying to memorize something like 66.102.7.99. And if your website moves to another server, its “public address” - domain name - remains unchanged.

This translation of server names into human-friendly domain names is done by Domain Name System (DNS) that stores many types of information about domain names. The strings of letters (and/or numbers and hyphens) between the dots in domain names are called labels. Each label can have letters (case insensitive), numbers and hyphens up to 63 characters long. It can not begin or end with a hyphen and must contain at least one letter. Domain name labels refer to domain hierarchy as explained below.

Top-level domain (TLD) name, sometimes referred to as domain name extension, is the part of a domain immediately after the last dot (”.com” in “maps.google.com”). There are many generic (like .com, .net, .org, .edu) and country-specific (like .us, .uk, .ca) top-level domain names, but the “.com” names are usually the best choice for a business.

Second-level domain is the part directly to the left of a domain name extension (”google” in “maps.google.com”). This part, along with a domain name extension, you register as your domain name (like “google.com”).

The part to the left of the second-level domain (”maps” in “maps.google.com”) is called - you guessed it - third-level domain, sometimes called subdomain. This part you can create by yourself at your web host later on. Why? To make a user-friendly address for an area of your website (like maps.google.com), or even build your brand around it (like del.icio.us).

Difference between domain name and URL (Uniform Resource Locator)? URL includes a domain name plus additional technical information. For example, the URL “http://maps.google.com” includes the domain name “maps.google.com” and identifies the HyperText Transfer Protocol “http://” used to access the website.

I hope it all makes sense now.

In case you are new to this, a website host (a.k.a website hosting provider) is a company that hosts your website’s files on their server (computer) at a data center and provides Internet connection for your website. If you think of a website as a book, then a website host is a book store that keeps your book on their shelf, available to visitors.

Now let’s look at the difference between the types of web hosting.

Free Hosting is a bad choice for a small business website. The reasons are plenty: very limited functionality, banner ads are usually displayed by web host on your website, non-existent customer service… The list goes on, so just save yourself some time and money and say no, thank you to free hosting.

Shared Hosting (a.k.a. virtual hosting) is the most common and affordable type. As the name implies, your website shares a server with other websites. Returning back to our website-as-a-book analogy: your website would be like a book presented on a shelf at a store, next to many other books on the same shelf. Shared hosting is just fine for the most small business websites that do not anticipate very high traffic or have some unusual requirements. With prices starting at well below $10, shared hosting will suit most of small business websites.

Virtual Private Server Hosting (VPS hosting) or Virtual Dedicated Server Hosting is a step above shared hosting. Like with shared hosting, your website shares a physical server with others, but is separated from them virtually, just like it would be on a dedicated server. You get many benefits of a dedicated server at a fraction of price and your website is usually faster, more stable and secure then with shared hosting. Back to our book analogy: your website would be like a book featured in a voting booth-like shelf where visitors can leaf through it in a relative privacy (hey, that’s not a bad idea). Prices start below $30 a month, and if you’ve outgrown a shared hosting plan, but don’t have a budget for a dedicated server, you should consider VPS hosting.

Dedicated Hosting provides a server dedicated only to your website. Expanding our book analogy, this would be the case when only your book would be featured on an entire shelf at the store. You have complete control over the choice of server hardware and software. Server administration is provided either by you or, for an additional fee, by the web host. For websites with very high traffic or demanding applications, a dedicated server is a must. Until then, you might be better off with virtual private server hosting instead of paying at least $130 a month.

Colocation Hosting is like dedicated hosting, but you supply your own server instead of using your web host’s. That would be like supplying your own shelf for your book - unless there is a very good reason for it, or you’re very good at making shelves, that would be kind of silly. In either case, you wouldn’t be reading this introductory guide, so I will skip the details.

There you have it. Now that you have a basic understanding of web hosting types, you can narrow down your choices and start shopping around.

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