Essential Online Marketing Tools: Domains and Hosting

To be successful online you need to first “exist” online. Your online existence is virtual of course, and is manifested in one thing: your website, which is composed of two things in return: your domain name and your website content.

If you are on a budget scroll down to the end of this article for a nice surprise

Choosing the Domain Name

Your domain name is like your virtual business address. When people want to stop by your “store” or “office” they have to go to your website through your domain name.

That’s why it’s highly important to pick up a domain name that’s:

  1. easy to remember, and
  2. tells all about your business.

And here is the thing: there are no duplicate domain names. Once a domain name is taken it’s taken. The only way to get it is to buy it from it’s current owner for whatever price they decide.

So, if you have been putting this step off, you’d better move faster and reserve the easiest domain name to remember and at the same time represents your business.

A dot com domain might cost you less than $9/year to get it from namecheap.com. It’s nothing compared to the price you might have to pay in order to get it from a current owner.

Choosing the Host

Your website content is your virtual property. The design, the texts, the graphics, and any downloadable material you might have on your website all together compose one virtual building.

For people to see the content of your website you’ll need to host them on a server. And here comes the dilemma: what hosting company should you build your business on their virtual property?

There is no straight answer to this question, it all depends on what your business model and size. And here are two distinctly different cases to make the picture easier to image:

An incorporated business would consider buying a server. First of all, it’s part of the capital costs and can be deducted from the company’s taxes within the capital depreciation limits over the years. So, it’ll get paid for by tax money. Another important thing is that an incorporated company would rather have every thing that belongs to the company under one roof for security purposes. Besides, having their files on a third party’s property makes part of the company’s operations under the control of that third party.

The other example is the extreme opposite, a small affiliate business. For affiliate marketing a dedicated server is out of questions. All what you need as an affiliate is a blog, a review site, and a lead capture page. You can host all of those and have plenty of extra space and bandwidth if you get the baby gator hosting package (use the coupon at the top right of this page for 25% discount). Unlimited means you get to host unlimited number of domains and websites on that hosting package.

The only question for an affiliate is how reliable this is. This is a controversial issue. The same hosting company might give one customer the best experience ever, and give another one the worst nightmare.

To solve this problem on choosing the suitable hosting for your small business you can either take the cheapest one and make it a habit to back up your site on your hard drive ever time you make a change, or go for a bit more expensive hosting with a trusted brand like Yahoo! hosting, which is also unlimited and includes a free domain.

If you are on a budget you can start with a $1.99/month unlimited hosting package that includes a free domain. Follow the link below to get one of those.
Award Winning Web Hosting