If you are setting up a website business, including setting up a blog, this article is for you and is here to help you to understand how to choose your website domain name and hosting company.

Paid for hosting or free hosting?

I would always recommend that you go for paid hosting and the reason for this is that you have more control over what you can and cannot do with you website pages and of course this is more professional.

A web hosting company that I use a lot is GoDaddy.com who are based in the USA and have a really great service where you can buy an all ready registered domain name. One of the benefits I have found with GoDaddy’s service is that they have a helpline which, even though I live in the UK, I have used a few times and it is sometimes very useful to be able to speak to someone in person in order to resolve an issue quickly and easily. There are not many web hosting companies that provide a free technical helpline like this.

If you buy an already registered domain name that is at least two-three years old, and if you are lucky it may already have visitors and a Google ranking, you will find it much easier to get onto page one of a Google search. Google tends to put “New” domain names on “hold”, just in case they have been set up as a spamming site, so a newly registered name will take much longer to be indexed and move up the page rankings.

So if you go to the GoDaddy.com website and go to the “Auctions” tab located at the top of this page you will be able to choose from hundreds of already registered website domain names. You can even get these for as little as $5!

So a suggestion, if you are setting up a website about let say “Phone Services” try putting this into GoDaddy’s “Keyword” box and change the “Keyword” “begins with” to “contains” and this will list all those sites containing your keywords. You could try entering one word at a time, so firstly try “Phone” and secondly, “Services” and see what comes up.

If you find a website domain name you like in this search, here is very useful Free tool called the Wayback Machine which will not only tell you how old this website domain name is, but also you can have a look at what it looks like by clicking on the historical pages.

The GoDaddy site will also tell you how many monthly visitors the site is presently receiving, although this is not as important as the age of the site.

The other check you can do for your potential domain name purchase is to check how many links are already pointing to it. Click here to get the free Link Popularity Check software and follow the instructions for this. What you will find is that you can very quickly enter this new domain name into this link checking software and with one click, you will see within seconds the links pointing to your chosen domain name from Google, Yahoo, MSN etc. This link information might give you an indication of the likely Google ranking it already has. For example, if there are 4-5 links under the Google column you might find this site has a Google Page rank of a one or two, of course this is not guaranteed.