So, you’re kicking off a new small business and you need a website and a professional email address. Just go to Google and search for “domain names for small business”.
Sounds simple right?
Unfortunately, there’s way more to this process than meets the eye. Thankfully, we’ve been doing this for over 15 years and we’ve stumbled across a lot of tricks that will make your life easier.
In this article, we’re going to share everything you need to know about getting your first domain name for your small business and how to do it right.
And, it’s written in Plain English for non-techies.
How domain names for small business work
I regularly teach small business owners everything they need to know about online tech. The majority of them come from backgrounds where tech has been something they can avoid, or have never been able to understand. My challenge, is to have these people be empowered by technology and use it to grow their business.
The way that works is to explain it all like this…
A domain name is like title or deed to a vacant shop. The title is usually a piece of paper to say you have to rights to use the shop, but it’s not the shop itself.
The hosting is like the physical shop. Every month you pay rent for the shop. You can do whatever you want with it, within the bounds of the title.
A website, is like the shopfront. Without a website, the shop is an empty room with four walls. When you build the website, it’s like giving the shop a fitout. We’ll cover more about shop fitouts later in this article.
Your website needs to physically sit on a computer somewhere in the world so that people can view it. So when you’re paying for hosting, you’re actually paying rent for a computer somewhere in the world. You’re also paying for security to prevent hackers from getting to the computer, you’re paying for the network that it runs on – just like you pay for internet at home and you’re normally paying for customer support, in case you need a hand with setting something up or if something breaks. This is the same as paying for security services as part of rent in a shopping mall plus maintenance people.
The shop must have the capability of handling this type of service. As an example, in a physical shop, you might offer free Wi-Fi. This is only possible if the shop is fitted out for Wi-Fi.
If your hosting is not capable of handling email, then you need to find somewhere that does. We’ll cover this topic later in this article.
Say someone sends a letter is sent to “The Manager, Shop 52, 100 Jones St, St Leonards NSW 2065”. Somehow, magically, that letter arrives on the manager’s desk 24-48 hours later. How does this happen?
DNS is an acronym for Domain Name Service. It’s like a postal sorting service for the internet that knows where everything is.
When you type a website into your web browser, or send an email or use Instagram on your phone, some magic happens in the background that knows exactly where they website lives, where that email address should end up and how your latest photo shows up on your Instagram feed.
DNS has a bunch of settings that translate human readable text, e.g. www.apple.com into a bunch of numbers that computers understand. So when you type in www.apple.com into your web browser your computer asks “where is the computer that has the Apple website on it?” DNS then tells your computer where it is. Your computer then sends the request to view the website to that computer and the computer sends back the website to your web browser.
This is also true for an email address. When you press send on your email, your computer talks to DNS and asks “where is the computer that handles emails for Apple”. DNS then tells your computer where it is. Your computer then sends that email to that computer.
This means, that your web server and your email server can sit on two completely separate computers, in separate countries. All that needs to happen is that DNS needs to be aware of it. We’ll cover this later in this article.
Hosting can be such a complicated beast. Luckily, I’ve immersed myself in this world for the past 20 years.
When I first jumped into website management in the corporate world we did our own web and email hosting. We literally had computers that sat under a bench with cables connected to our phone line that handled all web and email traffic.
Back then, it was way easier to run like this and hosted solutions were very very expensive.
These days the tables have turned. But, buyer beware – cheap does definitely not equal good.
The following needs to be taken into account for your website hosting:
To setup your email hosting, there’s a couple more options:
We’ve done our research and recommend Ventra IP for Australian-based website hosting. Why?
Follow this link to get started with Ventra IP website hosting.
What’s Next?
After you’ve paid for your domain name and your web and email hosting then it’s time to build a website for your business. I’ve been building websites since 1996 and will be sharing everything you need to know about them in our next article.
In the meantime, if you would love someone to do this whole thing for you, then take advantage of our special offer for our blog readers. Simply follow this link to spend 30 minutes with me, valued at $97.
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