by Stephanie Ly

Created on: April 02, 2010

An online business can be achieved in basically two ways, with or without a website. Although the latter is possible, you will be advised by many experienced online business owners and entrepreneurs that having a website will benefit you in many ways more than one. Setting up your own online business website is not difficult and involves the following steps.

Registration of Your Domain Name

Deciding on a domain name for your business is the first and most important step which cannot be taken lightly and involves some serious brainstorming. Some tips to help you is to choose either something original (yahoo.com), or use your own name (myname.com) or stick to related basic names (books.com). Try to avoid names that use numbers (books4all.com), or use misspelled words (onlinebookes.com). These can sometimes be confusing to remember. Stick to short names that are easily spelt and easily pronounced. Once you have decided on a name you need to register your domain name with a domain registrar or a web hosting service.

Choose A Web Hosting Plan

After registering a domain name your next step would be to find a web hosting plan for your website. Web hosting is equivalent to rent, where you are renting space on a "server" that is connected 24/7 to the Internet. The Internet contains hundreds of different webhosting services all with different plans, options, and features. This may cause you to be quite confused when first looking at web hosting solutions and so here is a quick summary of the important features you should look at.

Bandwidth – related to the speed, 1GB is usually enough for small websites, if you plan to run multiple sites or your website increases in popularity and traffic you may need to increase this or opt to choose a plan that provides unlimited bandwidth

Web or disk space – relates to the amount of space you need. The larger your files and website the more space you require. If unsure there are web hosting companies that provide unlimited space on their servers.

Support – is the web hosting service provider quick to help you? Try emailing them or sending a support ticket and see how long it takes them to respond.

Reliability – what is their uptime guarantee? This is the percentage of time they guarantee your site will be accessible to the World Wide Web. Choose a company that offers at least 99%.

Controls of domains – some hosting plans allow you to host multiple domains and park unused domains using the same account.

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