Mary Ann emailed today with a question regarding web hosting and domain names. I thought our correspondence might be of interest to others considering the purchase of these services.
Hi Dan,
in my new adventure I have discovered I do not have web hosting. We are in the Des Moines and Indianola area. What are you charging for web hosting. I have one domain name and bought four other domain names. You know they were on sale, of course and I sure didn’t know what I was doing. I want to keep one for sure and another as a “proxy”?
Mary Ann
Mary Ann,
I do not provide hosting and would advise against purchasing hosting from a web designer/developer since most are acting as resellers for the major hosting companies. I think you can get a better price by going directly to the source. What you may want to do is purchase a shared hosting plan from a volume operator like GoDaddy or Hostgator.
If you purchased the domain names from a company that also provides hosting I would consider buying hosting from that company as well. This way you won’t need to “move” the domains and billing is simplified.
You will want to devote all your effort and content to one domain per particular business. Duplicate content hosted on several domains will not help your search ranking and might even hurt it. I’d advise choosing one domain to host and develop your site on and letting the other domains expire, unless you want to hold onto the other domains for separate business ventures in different fields.
Buy the least expensive Linux based hosting plan offered (not Windows based hosting). This will be adequate for small business usage and you can generally upgrade easily if necessary. Check my Resources page for info on choosing a domain name and links to hosting providers.
Dan
True. We also don’t recommend windows server. An example of why don’t like windows server as operating system is because it doesn’t have htacces file that we use for web configurations. – Dev of outsource seo philippines