Hosting and domains
At Web Design & Mastery, arranging your web hosting and helping you to choose a domain name is all part of the service. However, we know that some clients like to do this themselves, or wish to buy the domain and hosting before making firm plans for their website.Here is a simple explanation of what is involved.
Hosting
When you buy hosting, you are paying a company to store your website and to provide it on the internet 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The connection to the web hosting company is much faster than ADSL or other products, which is why there is an advantage to paying for hosting rather than using a web server on the end of your own broadband connection.
Hosting providers should ideally provide other services such as traffic statistics for your site, and regular backups.
The two main types of product available depend on the operating system used by the web server. Microsoft Windows hosting products are usually slightly cheaper than UNIX or Linux (a command-line based operating system). You can expect to pay more if you have specific requirements such as requiring a large amount of disk space, for example if you have several large images or a very big site.
For stability and security, we recommend a UNIX / Linux hosting platform. However if you have specific Microsoft software requirements (such as a website using Front Page extensions, or using ASP code) you may choose to use a Microsoft environment.
Recommended: Rack Sense - a friendly, affordable and reliable hosting company
Domain name
A domain name is the address by which people will identify you and find your website (and send you email). Two domains used for this website are webdesignandmastery.com and wdam.co.uk. (Note there is no preceding "www".)
Many domain names, especially the shorter ones, have already been taken. For this reason you will need to have a selection of names in mind when searching for your ideal domain.
The domain is made of two parts. The first part is the bit you choose that is unique to you, like "webdesignandmastery". The second part is known as the TLD (Top Level Domain), among which the most popular is probably "dot com".
We recommend you buy a .com or a .co.uk - although .org is fine for a charity and .net is intended for a provider of internet services. There are others such as .uk.com but these are far less memorable and easy for your clients to forget or mistype - and go to a competitor's site instead.
The domain should be memorable and distinctive, which is why many online companies such as Amazon, Ebay and Egg have such off the wall names! This is much better than a longer or more convoluted name, particularly where competitors have similar names or where the spelling or hyphenation might lead to confusion. If your preferred names have gone, think outside the box and choose something memorable and distinctive!
Recommended: Gandi - an affordable domain name provider
"We are really delighted with our new website. Flash was extremely fast, friendly and helpful all the way through the process and went to great lengths to get the website just as we wanted. As complete novices to the world of website design, we were grateful to have a person who made the task run so smoothly.
Thank you very much!"
[Hackney Family Backup]
[Hackney Family Backup]
"Thank you so much for all your hard work on my behalf; you very quickly grasped the image I wanted to portray. I am really pleased with the website that was delivered earlier than I expected and on budget. Your extensive knowledge of websites and the legislation that affects them is impressive and led to a level of detail that I was not expecting. I literally could not have done it without you. It has been a real pleasure working with Web Design & Mastery."
[Kate Fishpool Associates]
[Kate Fishpool Associates]