If you want to create a website for your business, you must first set up your domain and web hosting. Your web host is the place where your website is actually posted so that people can access it, so it’s crucial to get a reliable host. You also need a domain name that people will associate with your business so that customers can easily find you.

The first thing you need to do is purchase your domain name. Your domain is your actual web address, such as www.myawesomebusiness.com. It’s important to choose a domain name that is short, catchy and easy to remember. It should also be relevant to your business.

Always buy your own domain. Don’t rely on free blogging sites such as WordPress for your domain. If you use a free site, your domain will include the site’s name (i.e. myawesomebusiness.freesite.com). This makes the site name harder to remember and also makes you look like an amateur.

Similarly, you shouldn’t use free hosting sites. Free hosting sites are a problem for a number of reasons. For one thing, many free hosting sites don’t allow you to use your own domain name. This not only wastes the money you spent on your domain name, but opens you up to the same problems with unprofessionalism as if you used a free blog for your domain.

In addition, many free web hosts support themselves via advertising. These hosts place banner advertisements over the top of your website. You may not have any control over the banner ads’ placement or contents. Thus, the ads may distract customers or, worse yet, contain material that is offensive to your customers.

Finally, free web hosts often don’t have good customer service. If your website goes down or you can’t figure out how to do something, you might have a hard time getting through to the company or they may take a long time resolving the problem. This can cost you customers because people might not be able to access your site for several days.

In order to find a proper web host, it helps to read reviews of different web hosts. You need to pay special attention to how well the web host handles customer service problems and how often the host is down. All web hosts have down times–times when the sites they host are not accessible because of a problem with the server. However, reliable web hosts are up and running most of the time, and problems accessing the site are resolved quickly.

Although web hosting sounds very technical, you don’t really need to know a lot about it in order to get your website up. As a business owner, all you need to do is determine which host will best meet your business’ needs. Look at web hosting as a business decision rather than getting worried about what you don’t know. Hopefully this article has given you some tips to help you figure out which web host is best for your business.