Web Hosting XL

Your interested in purchasing hosting, you have a great business venture or personal website that you would like to release upon the public. After a short while searching for hosting online you quickly become confused…

What are all the options about?

Why would I ever choose a Linux hosting account, I use windows 7 at home surely I need a windows hosting account?

Hopefully the following information will help you to remove some of the confusion.

Firstly, if you are having your website designed by an independent web design company; ask them which hosting account you require as they may have specific requests.

Ok, lets think for a moment about the type of website you will be creating.
There is a very simple rule I use when I offer advice on this question.

Q. Is your website going to be : Programmed in ASP (what is asp?)? Will your website be using an MSSQL or an Access database?

If the answer to any of those is yes, then you need a Windows hosting account.

However if you do not need any of the above features, my recommendation is a Linux web hosting account.

This will support all of your html pages, plus provide you the ability to grow your site, install blog or online shop software, online galleries (pretty much anything anyone needs!)…(yes I am biased towards Linux!) But for good reason, Linux offers more security and reliability on a server platform. You won’t need to know anything at all about linux to get you hosting up and running, your hosting provider will take care of that. Hopefully this has cleared the air a little around this question. Comments are welcome.

If you are new to the idea of domain registration and hosting hopefully this article with clear a few things up.

1. What is a domain name?
A domain name is an address that browsers use to access websites, e.g my domain name on this site is “hostingxl.com” the domain name is made up of two parts, the first part “hostingxl” is the unique identification of your domain name. The second part “.com” is called a tld (Top Level Domain).

2. Which TLD should I choose?
My advice is that if the .com of your choice is available then go for that as the .com domain TLD is the most commonly recognized. However, it can also be beneficial to register a country specific TLD (e.g .co.uk is a UK TLD); This helps search engines like Google to geographically target searchers searching in your country.

3. Should I just register my business name?
Not necessarily, registering a business name is good for brand building but not necessarily good for search results. Since Google Caffeine has been released Google has placed more weight on the domain names that contain the search term. Therefore it is beneficial to register domain names that include the main search term for your subject. Like for instance if you were setting up a website for a dentist in London you could check availability of the domain “londondentist.co.uk” or “dentistlondon.co.uk”.