What to Consider when Choosing a Domain Name

June 7, 2006; 08:40 AM
Suffolk, UK - Choosing a domain name can be exciting and frustrating at the same time. First you spend ages thinking what to call your company, or website only to find that the domain name is already taken. The best option is to pick any of the services you'll find on the web, and start keying in names that you'd like. More often than not, if the name is not available then they will suggest similar sounding names, one of which may be suitable.

Making the wrong decision when registering your domain name can cause weeks or downtime for your site and email in the future. Our advice is to register your domain with a reputable, long standing company who take their customer service issues seriously and will provide a voice at the end of a phone line should your domain suddenly stop working. There are a variety of Internet related magazines and web sites that rate current providers and will give you a better idea of which host to choose.

Whilst looking around for a host start thinking about a good domain name for yourself, if you have formed a limited company then this should make the task a little easier unless your preferred domain has already been taken. If you are going to form a limited company it may be a good idea to try and kill two birds with one stone, as so many domain names have now been registered the chances of the domain for your preferred company name being available and vice versa are slim. Checking both companies house and WHOIS records will take some time so it is a good idea to sit down and brainstorm ideas before going online to check availability.

As well as choosing your own domain name you could also check some of the providers of pre-registered domains. Although this option is not as cheap as registering your own domain name a lot of the better domains have already been bagged by these providers. Some give the ability to type in keywords and they will return the available domains that contain the keyword. Other services exist so that you can monitor domain names that have once been registered but the owner has not renewed them. Every day hundreds, if not thousands, of new domains come back to the market place for you to register.
Registering a domain name does not necessarily provide you with hosting and email service provision. A .co.uk domain can usually be registered for around £5 per year whereas a hosting package to provide you with emails and web hosting can cost from £30 a year upwards. The difference in pricing is usually due to the amount of storage space required, the number of email addresses allowed and the amount of data transfer per month. As a rough guide a fairly busy site may serve around 5,000 pages per month with a data transfer around 100Mb of data.

Once you have your email and web site set up do not forget to include these details on your business cards and email signatures.

Once you have chosen a hosting company and your website is live, you may wish to begin promoting your site to search engines to attract potential customers who may use search engines to source the services you offer. Check out our web site promotion section (http://www.the-e-site.com/index.php?pr=webpromote) on this to gain valuable insight on how it's done.

About The E Site Ltd.:
The E Site Ltd. is a new company that is aiming to cut through all the confusion and myths about starting your own business. What this site offers is honest independent advice and guidance about what you need to do, and what you should do when you’re considering starting up in business. What’s more the site offers to do this is simple plain English.

Phil Owens The e Site Ltd. http://www.the-e-site.com/index.php?pr=webpromote 07775914124 http://www.the-e-site.com