Picking a domain name

Think well about your domain name. If possible it should have the most important keyword you are targeting in it and it should be short and catchy that people can remember it. For most of my sites I spent one or two days checking for available domains before I made a decision.

If you have a name that is made up of two words you can write them together like thailandtrips.com. They are still easy to read for people but if they get longer think about using dashes to enhance the readability. For example thailandislandtrips.com is really a mess to read while thailand-island-trips.com isn’t.

Don’t got for anything longer than three words and I would always recommend that you try to get the .com domain. Everybody thinks about .com when they hear about a website address. I always register the version with separating dashes and without, just to make sure people won’t type it wrong if they have heard the name.

You might also think about common spelling mistakes and get the domains for that.

Top registrars and web hosting companies

There are many, many websites out there that offer you web hosting and domain registration services. I had, like many others, very bad experiences before with several domain registrars and hosting companies.

Many of them oversell the webspace and your site will load slow, the support service won’t reply for two days even though your site is down and you lose money…. I could write a couple of pages about the problems me and some friends had with bad hosting companies out there. Some are too expensive and one actually just took off with my money.

To help you out with that here is a list of services I used and use since 2000 and I can recommend. All of them offer “one click install” services that will make your life so much easier and help you to easily set up your website in a few moments without any technical knowledge. I will walk you through this in the next chapters step by step.

So lets get started and have a look at the first step of running your business online. Getting a domain name.

You should usually separate registrars and web hosting because if you are unhappy with one of them you don’t have the hassle of moving both the domains and your websites to another provider. Registrars are usually also cheaper for registering domains compared to web hosting companies.

Registrars:

is the world’s biggest domain registrar and that has a reason. They are reliable and offer really good prices and a lot of handy extra services. If you are concerned about your privacy for example they offer you the possiblity to get a private registration. Check it out. I have more than 50 domains over there.

is another major player in the domain game. They have a lot of business partners and were one of the first commercial domain registrars on the Internet. Their easy to use interface is great for beginners and like GoDaddy they offer a lot of extra features that you will want to have later on when your site grows bigger.

Webhosting:

This is easy. is seriously the most amazing hosting company I have ever been with. 90% of all my sites are hosted with them and their support rocks. This sounds a bit crazy but all my friends and colleagues sing the same song how good they are.

If you had as much problems with other hosting companies you appreciate that Hostgator makes everything run so smooth. Even if you go for one of the cheaper shared hosting plans the support replies to you usually within 1-2 hours. This is just fantastic because most other hosting companies only treat larger customers like this. The basic configuration is very good as well so you can pretty much run everything you want on their webspace and another huge plus in my opinion is that you can host sites for as many domains as you like on their webspace.

Two other good web hosting companies I only left because I didn’t want to pay for so many different hosts are and

Both worth a look but if you ask me I would always go to Hostgator.