Tips On Setting Up Your Website

If you're one of the many people who are setting up, or about to setup, their first website, here's some important information that will help you get started.

think of a domain name

Think up a name, and check if [thatname].com is taken. If you can't get that exact name as a dot-com, you could try it as .co.uk, .net or .org.

Try to register a name that describes your service or product, but avoid acronyms, such as abc.co.uk. A good name will be memorable and descriptive. A good example of this would be www.softwareforschools.co.uk. Increasingly; companies are seeing the commercial value in a name that is easily remembered by customers. Your web address (URL) can also be the same as your company name (if it is available).

To check .com, .org and .net availability:

InterNIC

To check .co.uk availability:

The UK internet names organisation: Nominet

To check any domain in the world:

Allwhois.com

domain name generators

If you are struggling to find a decent name you could try a domain name generator such as Nameboy and Domain Generator.

registering your domain name

Once you've found a suitable name you will need to register it.

NameCheap - very cheap US based domain registration, mainly for .com's, from as little as $8.88 a year. This is very good value and there are no hidden costs.

For .co.uk domains register them at UKReg.com for £2.95 per year.

transfering your domain name

If your current host has a control panel with the ability to modify your domain's nameservers then all you need to do is change them.

Sometimes you may need to change the Nominet IPS Tag. This norminally involves faxing the new details to your current host on signed company headed paper. To find out what your IPS Tag is follow the link below to perform a full whois search.

To perform a full whois:

whois

hosting the site

You will need to decide where you will host the site. This is the physical place (computer) where your website resides. Your website can be hosted with your Internet Service Provider, a hosting company or on your own server, if you have one.

Host your site with a UK based hosting company...

You might want to host in the UK for a number of reasons:

• Lower latency and faster speeds if on a server thats not overloaded
• Higher SEO ranking due to being on the correct IP range
• Being able to comply with data protection rules if you are hosting private information
• Being able to take legal action if needed
• Compared to the US, prices are pretty similar for decent quality hosts

You also need to decide what type of hosting you want and there are two flavours to this, Microsoft based or Linux/Unix based. We use PHP/MySQL programming and database languages which generally run on Linux. These languages are free to use and help us to reduce our development costs although hosting prices are similar.

If you would like to be more informed on the subject of hosting I would recommend a public discussion forum such as WebHosting Talk.

hosting recomendations

We've had good experience with Fasthosts where you will be looking to pay around £3.99 per month for a basic package and around £7.99 for a professional, MySQL database enabled package. So far, from our experience, Fasthosts have provided the fastest servers.

You could also look at NetPivotal which seem to offer a better deal, although on much slower servers.

You might also want to look at Clook and Easily.co.uk.

Please visit UK.tophosts.com for their monthly, top 25 recommended hosting companies.

In you need large bandwidth try 1&1. Their basic package comes in at £60 per year and that gives you 10Gb per month and £0.99 for every gigabyte over that.

Also, look at Webhostdirectory for more reviews and UK-relevant information.