Where to buy Domain names:
I have been buying domain names for over 8 years, and have seen companies overcharge, under deliver and recently even go under – and that definitely isn’t fun when you have nearly 100 domain names that you don’t know if they are going to stay with you. I was very happy that since then I’ve found one company I have used that offers value for money, and excellent support (either via telephone or via the web) and have a very fast and responsive website is Godaddy Not only is their service great, but you can usually grab a .com domain name for less than US$10. – and sometimes even less on their specials. I host all my domain names with GoDaddy (with the exception of some .com.au ones)
The only drawback with these guys, is they do offer many services, and it can seem a bit daunting the first time you register a domain name as they throw about 50 other complimentary services at you, but they they have recently done an overhaul of their interface, and it definitely has improved, and they do provide links to quickly bypass many of these offers as you go through the process. Check it out yourself here
Where to Host Your website?
If you want to have a website on the world wide web, you need a computer (called a server) to host it . What that means is having a computer that is connected to the internet all the time, so that when people want to access your website anytime, they can. Most of us don’t have the resources to set up our own server for this purpose, and it is usually much more cost effective hosting your website with web hosting companies.
I have used a few hosting companies, and have had some disasters, where the webhost has gone down, and lost all my websites and then they provided very bad support. Luckily I have now found a great webhost – HostingZoom, who made it easy for me to change over (they transferred over all my websites for me – normally this is something you do yourself, or get someone to do and can be very time consuming).
As well they offer redundancy (where they have a back up of your website, so should the server go down, within 2 minutes it will redirect to the back up, so your website will never be down for more than 2 minutes – very important if your business depends on it!)
And of course excellent support (support ticket response within 1 hour, usually less! plus they have LIVE support on some packages) I host all my sites with them, and am very happy with their continued service. Also what is important is deliverability – that is how much of the time are the live and not having issues, and i can only recall 1 or 2 times in the last 2 years, where there has been a problem, and when you select their redundancy packages, you minimise your chances of losing any of your information (which has happened to me in the past, where i lost a whole forum database of over 1000 users!)
Click here to see their web host plans.
eCommerce
eCommerce is one of the great revolutions of the new millenium. There are so many opportunities to sell products and services online. Generally speaking if you want to accept payments over the internet, you would have to set up a merchant account with a bank, and set up whats called a ‘gateway’ to allow processing of payments online.
This can be very costly if you are just starting a new business venture with limited upfront capital. One the great things about the internet, is that you can start with very low capital but still have an incredible opportunity to make a decent income online. Paypal is a great way to start accepting payments online with no upfront or ongoing fees. One of the reasons why I have been using paypal now for a year. Click here to find out more. .
