Developing Your Online Presence With a Quality Domain Name Registrar and Web Hosting Provider - You've decided to take your offline business online or begin an online business from scratch. It has the potential to be a great decision. However, before you can really work on operating the business and making a profit, you have to first have a presence online that shows you have an online business. This means registering a domain name and obtaining Web hosting so you can have your own website online.
A domain name is the URL, or Uniform Resource Locator, that indicates precisely where your website is located on the Internet. This is how people will locate you online - they type the URL into their Web browser (Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Safari, Opera, Google Chrome, etc.) and arrive at your website. Therefore, registering your own domain name is essential in order for you to have an online business.
Similarly, obtaining Web hosting is also critical to having an online business because you need your own website to show your own product offers, your own subscriber forms, and information about your business and what you offer.
As you would expect, there are plenty of domain name registrars and hosting companies who can provide these essential services to you. As you would expect as well, some companies are better than others when it comes to providing these services.
When it comes to domain name registrars, two of the most most recognized companies are NameCheap.com and GoDaddy.com. Both have experience in registering domain names, but reports suggest that they are NOT equal when it comes to providing the quality of service you need to have an online presence.
NameCheap.com provides simple and easy registration and live customer support 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for any problems that may arise (which don't occur very often). They are the preferred choice when compared to GoDaddy.com, who doesn't have the reputation for the same level of customer support, nor the same ease of registering your domain name.
GoDaddy.com relies on email communication only, and it's not 24 hours a day, 7 days a week like NameCheap's customer service provides either. Furthermore, if you receive a spam complaint (and you likely will at some time or other, as virtually every online business owner does), GoDaddy will shut down access to your site because of that complaint, even if it's a fraudulent complaint and you've never had a spam complaint before.
Reestablishing access to your site can take days and even weeks. During this period, your site does not appear to visitors, they cannot order from your site, and those who ordered, but didn't have their orders processed before the site was shut down, will presume that you were just a scammer who stole their money and ran, thereby ruining your reputation, which will make future business more difficult for you, especially if the incident is spread across the Internet, which is likely.
Additionally, GoDaddy.com makes it extremely difficult to move existing domain names that are registered with them to other domain name registrars, including NameCheap.com. They have a policy that a website must be unchanged for 60 days before they will allow a transfer. Therefore, if you update the site manually or an RSS feed updates the site, you'll have to wait an extra 60 days for a possible transfer. This means you'll have to cut off the RSS feed for 60 days or you'll likely never be able to transfer your domain name to another registrar.
Therefore, you are much better off by avoiding GoDaddy.com from the beginning and going with NameCheap.com if you want to avoid potential headaches with your domain name.
Regarding Web hosting, there are many quality Web host providers out there, but one of the best for Internet marketers is Kiosk. They understand Internet marketing and will work with you to try to make your business a success.
For example, if you get a random spam complaint, they will not automatically shut down your site like other Web host providers will often do, but will contact you to inform you about the spam complaint and advise you to remove that person's contact information from your subscriber list.
Don't feel that they won't get tough with you if you have a history of spamming people, however; if you have a history of spamming people, they'll shut you down quickly like any other Web host provider would, but if you have a clean history and get a random spam complaint out of the blue, they will most likely work with you so that you can avoid any downtime to your business.
Plus, if you are planning a major product launch and expect tons of website visitors and sales from it, you can inform Kiosk ahead of time of the product launch date and time and they will do their very best to watch over your site to make sure that the site and traffic servers stay online throughout your product launch so that you don't lose any sales, profits, and reputation from a downed site or crashed traffic servers.
It is certainly critical to choose a good domain name registrar and hosting company that provide excellent customer service to assist you in operating a successful online business. Without a good domain name registrar and Web hosting provider, you have virtually no chance of building and sustaining a successful online business. Therefore, it would be wise to evaluate as many options as possible for both domain name registering and Web hosting and to choose the two that you think will work best with your business both now and in the future.
Mike Filsaime discusses how to position and struture your business for long term success by getting the right people, in the right jobs, at the right time in greater depth in Module 5 of "The 7 Figure Code".
