In this article we are going to tackle how to set up your business web hosting. It details from the purchasing of domains, tips on choosing a domain, tips on choosing the best hosting provider, promotion of your domain and business. So, get a cup of coffee and start reading.
Maximize Your Domain’s Worth
You’ve chosen the perfect domain name for your website. One that solidifies your business image. Or so you think! Make sure to choose a domain name that reflects what your business is all about. For instance, you don’t want the domain name mechanics.com if you are selling shoes do you? Choose a name that will not only be representative of your products or services, but will also portray your business in a professional manner. Think before you buy! Valuation of a domain name is both an art and a science. Knowledge and experience in understanding the factors that influence the value of a domain name is the art, while quantifying the importance of these factors is a science. However, the reliability of appraisal values cannot be accurately determined without comparison of statistical models.
Due to their widespread availability and low price, domain names can often be bought on impulse. Most domains bought this way are rarely used. Think about it carefully before selecting a domain name. After all, you will be stuck with it for at least a year.
You then registered your domain name and now you think that it’s going to pay for itself a hundred times over. Well, you couldn’t be more wrong! No matter what domain name you buy, it’s not going to pay for itself on its own. Just because you think that you have chosen the most perfect domain name, others may not agree. Registering a domain name has become a lot cheaper over the years. As your business grows, you will probably want to register more domains. Don’t be swayed to choose the cheapest, they may not necessarily be the best. Remember that you get what you pay for. Maximizing a domain name’s value takes thought, creativity and effort. It also requires selecting a good name in the first place. That’s where it all starts. There are ways though that you can maximize the value of your chosen domain name. Let’s look at a few suggestions to help you do just that.
The Right Domain Name Matters
A domain name is your unique web site address and the location of your website. By registering your own domain name, you can distinguish yourself and promote your business instead of being one of millions of other users on one web address (ex: @everyone.com). In addition, your e-mail can be independent of your local ISP, which means that you can change providers anytime without changing your email address! This is very important to keeping your customers. While just about every word in the English language has been registered one time or another as a domain name, you may be talked into using a name that is hyphenated or one that has a funny-sounding acronym. You may think that it will be easier to remember this way. Not so! The reason is that in actuality hyphens make a domain name longer. Although a domain like Bobsinternetreservices.com is long, it’s not as long as bobs-internet-services.com. It can become very cumbersome and more difficult for people to remember because of all the pauses caused by using hyphens in the first place. The single most important thing that you NEVER want to do is to make it difficult for people to remember your domain name. You will never get traffic to your site that way.
Website owners often believe that hyphenated domains will improve their Web site’s ranking in search engines. This is simply not true. Once upon a time search engines looked at each word in between hyphens as a keyword. A search engine would then compare each keyword with the content of your site, match it to the query of the user performing the search, and then determine where your site should appear in its listings (ranking). Today, search engines are much smarter; they look at a website’s content and little else. Because of that, hyphenated domain names no longer have any influence on search engine rankings. The best way to drive traffic to your site is using a single name, even if it has to be a little longer that you would like. It’s better here to be safe than sorry later on.
Consider a Country Code Top Level Domains (ccTLD)
A Top Level Domain or “TLD” is the most commonly used code forming an Internet Domain Name. Apart from the well-known extension codes for domain names such as .com, .net, or .org, there are many others, which are used to divide the domain name space up geographically. A Country Code Top Level Domain or “ccTld” on the other hand has a country code as its suffix instead of the typical .com, .net or .org extension. Each country has its own domain extension; Canada, for example, is .ca, while Japan has been assigned .jp. From a functional perspective, Country Code Top Level Domains (ccTLDs) work just as well as any Top Level Domain. Today, more and more website owners are opting for country-specific domains. This is die to the fact that better names are typically readily available than when choosing a domain under the .com, .org or .net extensions. If all the domains available for your site are extremely long, it may be wise to consider purchasing a ccTLD. As long as the domain name can provide full functionality and regional branding, it really wont’s matter want the extension is. The downside to using cctld’s is loss of business branding. If you can’t afford to publicize the fact that your business is at yourbiz.to, then you stand a chance that no one will have a clue what your business is about. On the other hand, if your site will only be listed on the Internet, and won’t be advertised on TV or radio, you can probably get away with using a cctld, including a .us domain. The key to all of this is simplicity. Wherever possible it is extremely important to your business image to retain your own brand, whatever that is.
Promoting your domain to search engines
Once you have configured your domain to point to your Web site, you will need to ensure that search engines are aware of it. If they aren’t, your site will receive very few visitors - even if you have managed to find a memorable, snappy domain name. With a little bit of effort and a lot of patience, however, you can garner a significant traffic base from search engines. One thing to keep in mind when choosing search engines is that some of them take 3 or 4 months to spider those spiffy “doorway” pages that you made. You’ll have to be patient for them to work for you.
Without letting everyone in the world know that you have a website with products or services to sell, no one will even know that you exist. That’s where search engines come in. You have to tell as many as possible that you have an Internet business and search engines are an effective marketing tool to help you do just that. With search engines the goal is to achieve the highest-ranking possible to get more “hits” to your site. Search engines are “key-word sensitive” meaning that when you register with a search engine you will be asked to put in certain words that define your business. For instance, if you sell cats for a living, some keywords that you may use are cats, felines, kittens, etc. When someone is looking for information or products related to cats they would search the net using a key word. If it’s a match to one of your key words on the search engine, your business will come up on a list that they can choose from and be taken directly to your site. Now that’s how to drive traffic to your site.
Registering your domain
Until 1999, there weren’t many choices of registrars to register a domain name. There was a monopoly in the domain registration business by a company called NSI. In June of 1999 things began to change as several new companies were granted registrar status. Among them were Register.com and CORE. By January of 2000 things had changed dramatically with the increase of registrars to over 80 and about 100 additional CORE registrars. This dramatic increase broke the stronghold that NSI had on the registration business, they were a monopoly no more. The choices among registrars improved significantly. This was obviously good for those seeking to register domain names
The Registrar XE “Registrars” is important to website owners. They can’t resister their domain names to do business on the web without them, and they can’t do business without first registering their domain name. It’s a real catch-22 situation. The function of a registrar is therefore extremely important. They are the people keeping track of who owns what domain name and what server the name points to. However, simply buying a domain name doesn’t mean that you own it. There are registrars out there that will actually take ownership of your domain name in the process of registering it for you. While official ownership is usually irrelevant, it can be key in a legal dispute. When an ISP or Web host registers a domain on your behalf, they will sometimes register themselves as the official owner of the domain but they will grant you usage of it. In the event of an ownership dispute because of trademark or other reasons, the decision about whether or not to relinquish ownership of the domain will ultimately reside in the hands of your service provider instead of you.
Make sure that this doesn’t happen to you. When you choose an ISP or Web Host make sure it is clear that you will be the ultimate owner of the domain name not just the registrar. If the ISP or Web Host refuses to do this, search for another, you will eventually find one who will. Another thing to be aware of is that it usually costs between $10 and $35 a year to register domain names. You don’t get it for free unfortunately. When you have your domain name registered, make sure that you’re not over charged for this. To get all the facts on domain name registrars read the “Domain Name Buyers” guide found at amazon.com, outstanding.com or nameguru.com. Like anything else, always check around for the best price.
Selling Your Domain Name
Selling your domain name will take a lot of negotiating. When you negotiate to sell your domain name, you first need to find out how it will be used and just how interested the buyer is to that particular name. For example, Compaq purchased the domain name for the popular search engine altavista.digital.com. They were anxious to replace the domain name quickly with altavista.com, which would be more suitable to them. As luck would have it, a small Oregon company already took the domain name altavista.com. Compaq entered negotiations with this company to purchase the domain name. After long negotiations, Compaq paid $3.35 million dollars for the domain name (reported by the SF Chronicle, July 1998). You may never have the opportunity to enter into such financially large negotiations when trying to sell your own domain name but you still need to try to get the most money possible that you can. In order to give you a broader spectrum of negotiating power, you might want to consider using a domain name auction service. You can leave your asking price “open” to see how good the opening bid that you get is. If you get too many low offers with this method, you can easily change your offering to include a minimum asking price. Bids for less than $500 or $1000 are usually not accepted by most domain name auction services. Which is a good starting point for you. On the bright side, domain names are increasingly being priced for tens of thousands of dollars. For instance: TV.com sold for $15,000 and Business.com sold for $150,000 (reported by CNET - News.com June 1997). It all boils down to supply and demand. If you’ve got something that someone else wants, in the end they will pay for it.
Choosing Your Business Web Hosting
This article focuses on the differences between various business hosting services, and helps the reader identify some important criteria in choosing a hosting provider for their business (for instance, do you require a dedicated server, a managed server, or a shared server). A business web site could range anywhere from a simple ecommerce site which sells one product, to a very complex pay per click engine with real time statistics and payment functionality.
Even with all of the consolidation going on in the web hosting industry, there are still thousands upon thousands of hosting companies to choose from. If you visit some of their sites, you will see that each of them tout some features you may or may not of even heard of before (Miva Scripting, Co-Location services, Virtual Private Servers, Redundant backbone connections, etc). The very first question you must ask yourself is not which hosting company to choose but rather, WHY do you need a hosting company?
Your particular needs are crucial in determining the kind of hosting you need. Web Hosting comes in many different flavors and sizes, (not to mention prices!) so its key that you shop for only the services you require or you will be paying for a lot of services that you don’t need. When trying to decide which hosting company will best suit your needs be sure to ask yourself a few questions first. Here are some important ones:
1. What kind of functionality will you require (ie Database, secure server for processing credit cards, etc.)
2. What will your traffic needs require (do you anticipate your site having small, moderate, or significant traffic)
3. How important are load times (if a majority of your visitors are global you might want to consider a hosting company that has a presence overseas as well as the U.S. – also you may want to consider a dedicated server as opposed to sharing a server with several other businesses)
A business site can range in price anywhere from the low end of $40-$50.00 all the way up into the thousands of dollars per month. Features that usually catapult the price range are things like dedicated servers (especially if they are on the high end hardware wise), and bandwidth capacity.
Choosing a web host for your business needs is absolutely one of the most important decisions you can make. If your site is down, your business is down, end of story. Below is a list of some of the important questions you will want to make sure you ask any prospective hosting company before signing on the dotted line.
1. Do they offer a money back, no questions asked guarantee?
2. Do they offer an uptime guarantee? (as in, if there is a outage, are you compensated?)
3. What types of backups do they offer (tape back ups, CD rom storage)
4. Do they have redundant backbone connections to the internet (are they connected to the internet by more than one provider, and are those providers major backbone providers)
5. Do they offer 24-7 technical support (including phone support, or is it only via email)
6. How long have they been in business for and can they provide some business references of other sites that they currently host?
7. Can you pay month to month or do they require an annual contract?
8. Is it easy for you to upgrade/downgrade services you may or may not require as time passes?
Leave a Reply