Unless it is obvious, you should take some time to research the most appropriate domain name. Look at your competition and what will be found if you company name is googled. You don’t want to be confused with anybody else, or mistaken either.
Often domain names are ‘reserved’ so that they have been registered, but never used. You can do domain lookup to check who owns them. If it is a competitor then tread carefully.
Also, you should check social media. Has your name been used on twitter, facebook etc. You will want to use the same name across all platforms so check these first.
We wanted a name to reflect our interest in WordPress, and the development of the weekly club meetings, so WordPressBusinessClub was a great idea, except, WordPress organisation does not like people using the WordPress name. This is fair since what right do I have to claim to be WordPress. Instead, convention has us all using the initials, WP. Therefore the name WPBusinessClub.Com was chosen – Yes we were surprised nobody had taken it before!
If you do not have a big company name, then a domain name saying what you do can work well. Choosing the right domain name is a big issue and will be covered in more detail elsewhere.
When it comes to hosting, you want value for money and also the level of help suitable to your circumstances. We have chosen a three legged approach.
- The domain name is held at Fasthosts and its name servers point to the resources we want. if we need to change things, then quick access and fast updates will move the site, or email quickly.
- The website is currently hosted with 1and1 on a dedicated WordPress Hosting package. This is quite suitable for early development and also gives us backup sites, test sites and other supporting sites. Untill you have thousands of visitors, their WordPress hosting packages do a great job.
- We also have hosting on WPengine and currently expect to migrate the main site there after all our systems are running. However, their basic contract is for 25,000 visitors a month, so we need good numbers to justify that power. We also want a stable and clean system before we migrate, so you could think we are in ‘beta’ mode on 1and1
- Microsoft is providing their cloud based version of Office 2016 for our laptops, desktops and mobiles, and we have taken advantage of using their Outlook email service to host our emails too.
