Before you can get started in your venture to make some extra easy cash online you should understand a little bit about how domain-names and web hosting works. I will also talk about free hosting solutions which you can use and are perfectly OK to help you start off without having to pay for domains and hosting.
If you are lucky you will find a company that offers free installations and assistance with pre-installable forums, cms or traffic statistics and some even give you a free domain. The web hosts can provide such cheap prices without compromising in service quality by offering what is called Shared Web Hosting.
Selecting a good domain name for your website can be tricky. While sometimes the domain name you want may be taken already, you will see that just a small change in the domain name can give you a much better and SEO friendly name for your website. So, before you apply for a domain name, you will have to decide the best domain name for your Shared Web Hosting UK.
I have recently shared a customer's nightmare with a supposedly reputable domain registrar. All they wanted was their domain pointing to a different DNS server (the server that tells the internet where your website is), a simple request, they received no response from any of their emails. I didn't like their silence and suggested we actually move the domain to my registrar instead, more emails sent, more silence, weeks of it!
This is why I prefer Affordable Web Hosting plans. They give you more control of your website. If your site doesn't generate traffic right away you will not have to worry about having your web hosting service cancelled with no warning. You will also be given more tools to help grow your website and make your site more user friendly. Reliability is also something you get with paid hosting. They want to keep you as a customer so they will do more to keep you satisfied. Free web hosting can be crappy on purpose in hopes that you will upgrade to the paid service so you might as well get an affordable web hosting plan that fits your needs.
When this is the case, maintenance costs are also going to be an issue. Using a shared server, a lot of different places will share the same server so maintenance costs are going to be shared as well. This can greatly reduce the cost by a lot because every one of the companies that have a space on there will be paying a certain percentage of it based on the amount of disk space that they are using.
I can't stress this enough, with an established online business your most precious asset is your domain name. Don't risk your business for the sake of saving a few dollars!