Web Domains and Hosting – What Businesses Should Know
Imagine you’re a customer and you want to find a business selling the product you’re after. In time gone by, you would have turned to a phone book or directory, or visited the local high street, but most people head to the internet to see whether what they need is available. Most businesses have at least some presence online, but some haven’t caught up with the times.
A website is something no business, irrespective of their size, location or industry, can be without. For many people it’s the first port of call for them to get in touch or to find out more about products, services and prices. It’s also a great marketing tool, which can be used in tandem with social media accounts to push campaigns and special offers.
Be remembered
If you run a business and don’t have a website, there’s nothing stopping you from setting one up, but you need two things to help get you started – a domain and web hosting space. The former is the web address where people can find your site, while the latter is the space where your site is hosted.
As far as your domain is concerned, there are a few things you should take into consideration. They are:
- Memorability – keep your domain name short and snappy. Anything too long can be easily forgotten
- Price – you don’t want to pay over the odds, but at the same time, the cheapest domains are usually the least popular
- Relevance – ideally, your company name should be in the web address, but a shortened version will usually suffice
Finding a domain used to be time consuming, but sites like daily.co.uk have made it much quicker.
“We are aware that technology is constantly advancing and as a result we want to keep improving our features to meet your needs. We’ve speeded up our domain search so that it’s ultra-lightning speed”, they said on their blog.
More capacity the better?
A domain name is important, but is completely useless without web hosting. It’s the space where sites are kept, and where web traffic goes to. Different businesses will have different needs in terms of the amount of traffic they want and expect, not to mention the size of their site, but there are three types of hosting package to choose from.
- Shared hosting – the cheapest option, but also the most limited in terms of bandwidth needed to cope with extra traffic
- Virtual private servers – the best option for small businesses with a moderate range of products, they use a handful of shared servers which allow for increases in traffic
- Dedicated servers – the most expensive of the three by far, but it allows for complete control and has vast amounts of bandwidth and space for extra pages
