Buy a Domain

If you choose to try affiliate marketing, or even if you want to just build a website, there are a few things you should know about the purchase of your domain name.

Many web hosting companies will offer you a free domain name with purchase of their web hosting program, but first consider this.  We have owned The Gourd Reserve web site for our arts and crafts for over ten years.  During that ten years, for one reason or another we had to change domain hosts.  Many of the so called "Big Gun" web hosts out there, many of them can have serious issues like down time, change of management which changes your pricing or quality of service, etc.  Most of these web hosting sites charge $17/year or more for your domain, but they offer them free for as long as you host your web site through them.  Had we purchased our domain through our original host, we would now be paying $17 per year for our domain name because we no longer host through that company.  The alternative would be to remain with a flakey and unpredictable server just so we could have our domain for free.  You see, once you purchase your domain through a specific company, they hold the account on that domain name and if you want to move and move your domain with you, you will most likely have to change your domain.  once you have established years of return customers or visitors to your web site, you don't want to change your domain name.

GoDaddy, (www.GoDaddy.com ), has one of, if not THE lowest price on domain names out there.  You can move your web site from one host to another, and change your name server pointers in Godaddy to reflect the new location of your web site.  I know this sounds complicated, but it really isn't that difficult.  If you choose to do so, www.GoDaddy.com  also offers up web hosting, but we have been very pleased with the service at lunarpages for our web host for our larger sites.  The Gourd Reserve is almost 600 pages in size, and our goal is to eventually be in excess of 1000 pages.  The hosting at Lunar pages has been flawless, but you can read that on the web hosting page next. We have also hosted most of our web sites at Lunarpages which has been the most dependable host we've found in  10 years and have one of the best support policies of any of them, but we'll talk more about that on the next page. we also have a lower priced domain host on that page, they have other benefits and are also very dependable.

Your domain will cost you once a year, and is paid annually, or you can save money by paying for 2 or more years in advance. Godaddys rates are generally around $6.99 to $8.99 per year for a typical .com name.

Secondly, stay away from the .biz, .info, .net names unless you want to purchase those simply for the purpose of covering all the bases for your .com web site.  People generally search the internet for the .com.  If you name is Deb and you sell pansies online, you might want a name like debspansies.com.  once people get familiar with you and are looking for Debs Pansies, they will generally type debspansies.com into the address bar, not debspansies.info or debspansies.biz, and it is very possible they will never find you again if you choose one of the second hand extensions.

Next, select a domain name that is something that both reflects what your web site is about and will also be easy for people to remember. If you are promoting custom made jewelry affiliates, you might want a name like customjewelry.com or selectcustomjewelry.com or debscustomjewelry.com.  Something that is going to reflect what people are looking for, and because it is what they are looking for, that domain name will be easy for them to remember next time they want to come to your site.

Once your domain name is selected, now you want the right domain hosting company