Domain & Hosting

           For you who are newbie in internet (myself included), who only googling and comment on path, twitter or Facebook probably still can’t distinguish between domain and hosting. Well that’s natural since our purpose of using internet is just having fun. But if we change our mindset about our internet activity, not just wasting time but to make money that can support our education or family welfare, we will surely need to know about these two words.

           First is domain. What is domain? Domain is a name that we put in our website, such as Facebook, yahoo, google, etc. Name of our website -domain- cannot be the same with others that already in internet, “there can only be one” as the highlander said. Why? Because your name domain is where you post your articles, photos and other memories. Domain can be long or short depends on you, what kind of name you want for your website.

Do & don’t for domain name:

1.      1. Don’t use symbols.

Put yourself in your friend’s ear (usually shoe, but I want a different one), if you said “visit my website 4licious.com” what they will type in browsers? Fourlicious or 4licious or 4-licious or four-licious? Make your domain name as easy to spell and pronounce.

2.      2. Don’t use s*x or vulgar word

You know it’s a forbidden activity to be display but very much people searching for it. Several country had blocked domain names that lead to s*x activity. If you still use that word your web probably would not reachable from certain country visitor.

3.      3. Don’t use other brand

That’s obvious! You want to sell your own product or competitor products? Make sure your domain name have distinctive compare to competitors’ name.

4.       4. Long or Short domain names?

Actually there are no disadvantage about long or short domain names as long your name easy to spell and don’t use the forbidden 3 above.

5.       5. Com, org, net etc

Usually people will use .com instead of others, but you can’t always get what you want right? If you’re desirable domain.com is not available try .net or .info. For .org usually use by non-commercial organization. Make sure for your commercial or individual website to use .com because it’s the most popular top level domain.

6.      6. Use Keyword as domain

I bet you already know about SEO (Search Engine Optimizer), a little thing about SEO, if you put a keyword that represent your product in your site there are a possibility google will put it on first page. You must be disagree, because some people not put keyword in their domain name and still in first page. I am not a really expert on this (since I’m just a newbie), but some people say it would do your site a good thing in SEO. Well in SEO not only domain name, but article also important. You can explore more about SEO by googling.

Where do you get domain names for your website?

           You can buy it online, there are tons of website that sells domain names with various price just compare it and pick one that you comfort with. Just search it “buy domain name”, and there you go! There are locals’ domain name and international domain name, if you want mass coverage you should choose international domain name, and for the segmented area you should choose locals domain name.

Let’s move on to our second subjects, hosting (web hosting). What is Web Hosting?

Web Hosting is where you put your domain to, some kind of space that you can rent. Without hosting you cannot placed your files and your domain would like a disconnected phone number in phone book. It’s a service that allowed your domain to be online on internet. There are three types of Hosting:

1.       1. Shared Web Hosting

This type of service contains a very large number of website that it hosted in same server. As you can see, with a lot of web in one server hosting there are possibility your website could have misconduct due to the capacity of server that are running busy.

2.       2. Dedicated Web Hosting

This type of service are a save hosting for your website, because the entire server is dedicated for your website only.

3.       3. Virtual Private server Hosting (VPS Hosting)

This type of service is a hybrid of the two above, a website is hosted with virtual server. Its mimics a dedicated server within a shared hosting server environment. It’s different from shared and dedicated server because you don’t have to pay a lot of money for dedicated services but you get the same services.

           After you bought domain and hosting, you must connected the two. It is recommended for a newbie (such as myself) to buy domain and hosting from the same web, because you can get support immediately by that site, my experience buy domain from “A” site and hosting from “B” site is very confusing and a hard sweat. It’s hard work for me since I’m not really a gadget guy. So I ask my friend that know about this thing to help.

           Before you rent a host server make to know about what’s include in that package rental, such as how long rental period? How many storage apply? 24/7 customer support teams?

Local Hosting or Foreign Hosting?

           From my search in web, there are no boundaries for better host between locals and foreign. Some people says USA Hosting Server is better than others, but that’s depends on the company that provide hosting services, dedicated server or not, and package plan that you choose.