Tips On Domain Name Choice

Before buying your domain name, give some thought to the following:-

1) If possible use your sites name as the base of your domain name e.g. www.discountdomainsuk.com for Discount Domains UK. This might seem common sense but not every site follows the convention. If you use your name in your URL it will be much easier for your consumers to come across you.

2) Generic names – if you can register a generic domain such as toys.com that’s great, but most of these have already gone. Also getting ranked in the search engines is likely to be harder. Selected a domain closer to your market segment will cut down the competition. E.g. toyplanes.com

3) Hyphenated Names – Its easy to forget the hyphen! Which is the problem, particularly if your customer remembers your name but not you’re URL? Though on a positive note hyphenated names are less likely to be registered already.

4) If the .com or .co.uk extension is not available then consider the alternative TLD (Top level domain types) such as .net or .biz. If your domain name has already been registered then approach the owner and ask if they’ll sell. They may accept a 100. If you ask, they can only say no.

5) Plurals. Very often a domain name will be free in the plural but not in the singular form. It’s a personal choice, but if your preferred choice of domain name is not available you might be stuck.

6) Short or Long domains – A short domain name is more memorable, but less likely to be available. A longer domain is harder to remember, but can contain more keywords which is important as some of the search engines, use keywords in a domain name as part of the search algorithm.

7) Which Top Level Domain Type - .com, .co.uk , .net etc This is a question I am often asked. There is no evidence that any domain name type is given preference by the search engines. However some search engines such as Google, have local searches e.g. www.google.co.uk which do select local content. Customer often gets re-assurance from seeing a local TLD as they know they are dealing with a local company etc. You can, of course, register all of them!

8) Variations – If your preferred domain name is not available then its always worth trying a prefix my e.g. mydomains.com or suffix e.g. domains4U.com etc

HostGator Ratings

CUSTOMER SUPPORT:

Host Gator very well knows how to make customers completely satisfied for the whole business of web hosting relies on the complete satisfaction of customer. For this purpose host gator has hired experienced and qualified people which provide you with technical support around the clock, seven days a week. Besides the telephone helpline host gator has introduced live chat by which you can communicate more quickly and as you can better explain the problem you’ll definitely get a better solution. Besides this there are comprehensive articles which help the customer and with ticketing and billing services it is easier to change your bio data.

CONTACT INFO:

Telephone helpline: 1-866-964-2867 (24/7 sales lines)
1-561-353-1164 (24/7 support line)

Fax: 1-(954) 827-0666

E-mail:
sales@hostgator.com
support@hostgator.com
billing@hostgator.com
reboots@hostgator.com (Dedicated Server Reboot Triage)

Mail:
HostGator.com
9964 Robins Nest rd
Boca Raton, Fl 33496
United States of America

Domain Hosting - Best Domain Web Hosting (2010)

Below is a complete association of the best Domain hosting providers. We have taken the Top 5 Domain Web Hosting companies and compared plan pricing, disk space, bandwidth, and the number of domains that you can host with one account.You have the whole thing that you need to make an informed decision.

A domain hosting company does just that: hosts your domain name on its servers so Internet users anywhere can type in your URL and access your Website by domain name. In most cases, domain hosting and Web hosting are the same thing.You can register your own domain name via either a domain registrar or domain host. Many hosts also offer additional domain services, including the ability to host multiple domain names and sub-domains on a single account. Registrars and hosting companies can also park your domain name if you want to reserve a particular name for yourself but aren't ready to put up a Website yet.

If you’re worried about privacy, you might also want to seek out a host that can help you with private domain name registration. Private registration ensures that spammers can’t find your email address via a domain name registration database.

Domain names are available with a wide range of extensions, including .com, .net, .org, .info and .biz. You can also get country-specific domain-name extensions like .us ( USA), .ca ( Canada), .jp ( Japan) and .de ( Germany).

Google Begins Web Hosting

Google is more disposed to be the depository of customer data with each release it announces. The beta launch today of Google Page Creator adds personal pages to the hosted hand-outs from the search monster.Google already hosts blogs through its Blogger service; photos via Picasa; e-mail sent to Gmail accounts; video uploaded to Google Video; and all sorts of miscellaneous files uploaded to Google support.

Now, here comes Google Page Creator, a free, browser-based tool for creating Web pages that are stored by Google.The WYSIWYG interface eliminates the need to know HTML. Users need a Gmail account to begin construction pages, which will be easy to get to to others at a URL that begins with the Gmail user name.Google Page Creator is available via Google Labs, but demand was so high that the company already has a waiting list for listing. Google Page Creator follows Yahoo 360 and MSN Spaces in the personalization position that both Yahoo and MSN offer. Both personal publishing and communication services can be linked and accessed from one place. Page Creator is the second Google service to link to a further; the company recently linked Gmail and the Google Talk messaging applications.

Internet hosting service

An Internet hosting service is a service that runs Internet servers, allowing organizations and individuals to serve content to the Internet.

A common kind of hosting is web hosting. Most hosting providers offer a shared variety of services. Web hosting services also offer e-mail hosting tune-up, for example. DNS hosting tune-up is usually bundled with domain name registration.

Web hosting technology has been causing some controversy lately as Web.com claims that it holds patent rights to some common hosting technologies, including the use of a web-based control panel to manage the hosting service, with its 19 patents. Hostopia, a large wholesale host, recently purchased a permit to use that technology from web.com for 10% of retail revenues. Web.com recently sued Go Daddy as well for comparable patent infringement.

Free web hosting service

A free web hosting service is a web hosting service that is free, usually advertisement-supported. Free web hosts will usually offer a subdomain (yoursite.example.com) or a directory (www.example.com/~yourname). In contrast, paid web hosts will typically provide a second-level domain alongside with the hosting (www.yourname.com). Many free hosts do allow use of separately-purchased domains. often, a free host may also operate as a domain name registrar.

Hostgator Review

Hostgator is a privately owned web hosting company founded in 2002. According to Hostgator official claims, they provide hosting service for more than 1,000,000 websites and lead in hosting reseller accounts with over 20,000 resellers.

Hostgator Overall rating
What’s good with Hostgator hosting?
BabyGator Price
12 months plan $9.95/mo
24 months plan $8.95/mo
36 months plan $7.95/mo

Hosting Features Specs
Disk Space Unlimited
Monthly Bandwidth Unlimited
Free Domain Name No
Free Site Builder Yes
CGI-BIN Yes
SSI Yes
Frontpage Extensions Yes
FTP Access Yes

Email Features Details
Email Accounts Unlimited
Forwarders Yes
Auto Responders Yes
Web-Based Email Yes

eCommerce Features Details
Agora Shopping Cart Yes
osCommerce Yes
Zen Cart Yes
Cube Cart Yes
Private SSL Yes

Software/Plugin Details
Perl 5 Yes
PHP 5 Yes
mySQL Databases Unlimited
Ruby/Ruby on Rails Yes
Java script/DHTML Yes
Fantastico Yes
Message Forum
(PHPBB & more) Yes
Guest Books Yes
Image Galleries Yes

Payment Method Details
Credit Card Yes
PayPal Yes

Policy Details
Full Refund 45 days

I’ve been hosting websites at Hostgator long before I started this website and I still run a couple of websites with them at current time. With its quality service, the hosting company is growing fast and was named top in Texas for the recent Inc 5000 Awards.

Indeed they are one of the best hosting companies you can ever get and they are in my ‘A list’ and here are the keypoints of Hostgator’s success.

*Updates: Hostgator is now my top choice of hosting. Hostgator hosting service is reliable, priced reasonable, environmental friendly, and best of all, their customer supports rocks!

Reliable server with guarnateed 99.9% uptime

Thru out the years Hostgator has never fail me as a reliable hosting service. I barely notice any downtime for my websites – while this was quite a surprise until I recently found out that Hostgator is running its own data center (huge plus point).

Also, it’s worth noting that every web hosting plan with Hostgator comes with a 45 day money back guarantee and 99.9% uptime guarantee. The deal is fully guaranteed by the company founder and CEO (Brent) himself – which is another huge plus point (responsible management team).

Host unlimited domain

Hostgator is now offering 600GB of disk storage and 6,000GB bandwidth unlimited bandwidth and disk storage!. On top of that, you will get unlimited domain hosting with Hostgator. In short, this actually means that you can host ALL YOUR WEBSITES in just one single web hosting account with Hostgator.

Unlimited MySQL and POP3 email account

While most other hosting companies will only allow you to have a certain number of MySQL database, you get unlimited (I repeat, unlimited!) MySQL database with Hostgator. That’s quite an advantage if you’re planning to build a huge web application.

Room to grow

Hostgator offers shared, dedicated, reseller hosting. Along with the recently launched VPS hosting plans, Hostgator offer great rooms for website growth. This makes server switching and upgrading possible within Hostgator – which in other words, huge money and time savings for you as the website owner.

Environment Friendly

Lately Hostgator had turned green by powering and cooling their server using wind power.
Potential drawbacks with Hostgator

Some users might be not very happy with the price tag of Hostgator hosting. Without doubt, Hostgator is a little pricey compare to most other web host (about $1/mo extra compare to the average).

In my opinion, however, this is absolutely okay as you get what you paid – quality web hosting server with top notch customer supports. Read further on the customer reviews and you’ll see what I’m talking about.