What is web hosting & domain name registration?
In order to launch your web site, and make it visible to the rest of the world, you need to:
- register your domain name
- find a web hosting company
Domain Name Registration, Nelson BC
Domain name registration is the process of reserving your web site's .com, .ca, .org, etc address. You then pay a yearly fee to 'rent' you domain. The fee is typically about $12 per year. For our own website, for example, we have registered the names "i9design.com" & "i9design.ca". We pay a company called godaddy $12 per year to hold a record of this domain name as being ours.
An Very Important Note about Domain Name Registration
There are only a few large companies that do this service, and we do recommend that you buy your own domain directly using one of these companies. What can happen, and we see this quite often, is small companies use another service or a web design firm to register their domain for them. Then those companys fold, or disapear, and they are left trying to regain control over their domain names. As you are registering a domain name that is critical to your branding, marketing, etc, you should always do so under your own name.
GoDaddy.com
We use godaddy.com, as they are a large reliable firm, they have excelent rates. To simplify your sign up with godaddy, click on the link on their home page as shown on the right. This will give you access to a clean checkout that is free from "Add this to your order" anoyances.
Web Hosting
You domain name only points your web address to somewhere on the internet where the files that make up your web site are located. It does not store these files for you. This is why you also need a web host.
You web host is a physical computer that is ideally connected to a very fast and central point on the world wide web. It is specialized computer able to serve web pages, data, and files at a very high speed. It controls things like email, data requests to your web site, & runs special web applications like word press or shopping cart software.
Choosing a Web Host
You can choose any web host, but unlike domain registration, the server you choose will directly effect the performance, reliability, and speed of your web site. Because of this, we host most of our clients on our own dedicated server that is located in one of the fastest data centers in North America. It is a physical computer, connected to an ultra high speed fibre optic line & housed in a facility that has backup power generators & 24 hour monitoring.
Basically, we have bought a very high end server and we share it with our clients so that they can enjoy high end performance for the same price they would pay for more public and less reliable hosting. Currently, our server only uses 25% of its performance capacity.
You can learn more about our web host at: KootenayWebHosting.com
If you want to find another web host, we do recomend spending a little extra. $8 a month is a good base price. We have had clients on $1 a month plans whose web site were hacked. So some of those servers a bit too 'public'. Companies make hosts like those viable by serving thousands of web sites on a single server - which can lead to increased down time & hacking exposure.