Looking for a domain name when you are starting up your online business can be a challenge, even though it seems like a small detail. The right name is important because without a good name, your company will not be properly represented. The best thing to do is find something relevant and catchy.

Follow some of these tips, and you can help avoid making some of the mistakes that have set back many would be online entrepreneurs.

The first thing that a lot of people do wrong is choose a name that is just too long. Nobody likes having to type long www. addresses, and keeping your name short and concise will increase your chances of people checking out your site.

Not only that, but the longer the name, the better the chances are that people will type in a wrong character and get directed to a different or non existent site. Simply put, the shorter your domain name, the better off your business will be in the long run.

Making your domain name confusing will also cause a lot of problems, so it should be avoided. Not unlike a vanity plate you see on a car, they can either be good or bad, but they should make sense and be easy to read and remember.

The three C’s to remember are to make your domain name clear, concise and clever. But this takes some thought and tact too. You don’t want a name that will make your site the butt end of jokes either, so use good judgment.

One other big mistake that is common is the use of dashes in the domain name. These can be annoying, lead to typing errors, and they just do not reflect a business well. Try and limit your name to something that just has words.

One more note on dashes. They are better served in sites that do online business only. This is because most people will be clicking links directly to the site. However, for someone who has to enter the name into their browser, it will be very easy for them to put the dash in the wrong place and get sent somewhere completely different than your company.

Check out more of this author’s advice on subjects such as cheap soccer shoes and soccer equipment.

Hosting support can possibly best be compared to insurance. Most of the time you won’t need it but when you do, it will be critical. Many people are sold on the benefits of cheap and free web hosting solutions only to find themselves up the creek without a paddle when things go wrong. Good hosting support is probably the biggest deciding factor when it comes to differentiating between a good and bad hosting provider. If you are relying on your website as a major marketing tool, you cannot afford to be without 24/7 support from your hosting provider. Your website is being accessed by customers 24 hours a day from around the globe. If your site goes down and there is no support from your hosting provider after hours, you could be losing out on valuable business. Let’s take a more detailed look at why 24-hour support is essential.

What Downtime Means for Your Business

It could just be for an hour a day but in terms of anyone’s business, that is far too long. For the period of time that your website is not accessible, you simply don’t exist on the Internet. You may know that it’s just a temporary downtime but your customers don’t know this. If they search for your company and your site brings up an error then they could assume that you are no longer in business. Think of how many unique users visit your site in a month, and how many of those potentially search your site in an hour. That’s how much potential business you could be losing out on if your site is down.

Your Website Is Your Biggest 24/7 Business Marketing Tool

Many businesses are operating on a global scale. This means that when you have shut your doors for the day, your website is still working for you. Think of how often you go home and browse the Web in the evening. You may be looking for a holiday package, investigating new gadgets for your favorite hobby, or shopping online for books, videos or gifts. Any of these businesses featuring the products that you are looking for will need to be up and running if they are to be picked up on the search engines. The same applies to your business website. You cannot afford downtime as it can cost you valuable business.

Customers Have a Wide Range of Choice

Perhaps one of the most important reasons to have 24-hour support is that you want to retain your customers. If they try search for your website and come up with an error, they will simply take that at face value and move on to the next supplier. Seldom will they try contact you by some other means or think that your website may be temporarily down. Customers have such a broad range of choice on the Internet. Unless you give them a compelling reason to buy from you, there is no reason for them to exhibit loyalty to your business.

Why You Need Server Support When Your Website Goes Down

When your website goes down, it is really only your server host that will be able to tell you what the problem is. If you have shared hosting, it could be that one of the other websites on that server is using all the bandwidth. Or it could be that there is a more serious problem with the server. If there is 24-hour support, they will be able to investigate and address the issue immediately. This means that your website’s downtime is minimized. Hosting providers generally have diagnostics that they can run to identify and isolate the problem. But if your hosting provider’s support desk only operates during office hours, you could have a website that is down for 12 hours or more and that could be disastrous for your business.

What’s the Difference Between 24-Hour Support and 9-to-5 Support?

Most often, hosting providers that have 24-hour support will charge a little more for their services but in the long run, it can be worth every cent. If you have a dedicated server, you will want that extra service guarantee. Most often, you will have an e-commerce site or user interface where your customers can log in. And that needs to be operating 24-7. The only way you can ensure that happens is to have a hosting package where you know you have 24-hour support. It can make the world of difference to your business.

Web Hosting at ReviewItOnline.net is a large team of experienced webmasters, web users, site owners and company leaders here to help you – webmasters of the future with all of your website hosting needs. We review companies such as hostgator and blue host

If you sometimes feel as if your Web designer is speaking to you in a foreign, even alien, language, you need a way of cutting through the Web design jargon. You can find some great dictionaries online, but for starters, here are over 40 of the most common terms you are likely to encounter.

ACROBAT: Acrobat is used as a synonym for PDF file, but actually it is the program family you need to create and read PDF files. Adobe sells Acrobat Standard and Pro, which are creation tools, and freely distributes Acrobat Reader, which is a viewer (with some annotation tools in the latest versions).

APPLET: A program written in the Java programming language that can be included in an HTML page, and can contain flashy effects or useful programming.

ASP: Active Server Pages. A specification that enables Web pages to be dynamically created, or to access information from databases. The default language for writing ASP pages is VBScript, but other languages are also used.

BANDWIDTH: The amount of data sent over a connection in a specified amount of time is measured in bits per second (bps), kilobits per second (Kbps) or megabits per second (Mbps).

BTL/ATL /TTL: BTL (Below The Line) advertising means print media like brochures. ATL (Above The Line) advertising refers to such expensive media as TV and radio. TTL (Through The Line) is a combination of the two.

CGI: Common Gateway Interface. This server-side program allows data to be passed between Web applications.

COLD FUSION: This specification enables Web pages to be dynamically created, or to access information from a database. The default language for writing Cold Fusion pages is CFML (Cold Fusion Markup Language), and the page extension is .cfm.

CONTENT: The graphics and copy (text) that make up your Web site.

CSS: Acronym for Cascading Style Sheets, an external document that controls variables like color and fonts on your Web site.

DHTML: Dynamic HTML. A combination of HTML, CSS and JavaScript is used to create small effects, animations and dynamic menus on Web sites.

DNS: Domain Name Service translates domain names back and forth with IP numbers using a DNS server.

DOMAIN NAME: The address of your Web site (e.g. coza-web.co.za or google.com).

DPI/PPI: Dots Per Inch and Pixels Per Inch determine whether an image has high, medium or low resolution. Images for Web publication should have 72 ppi, those to be printed on deskjet printers should have 150 ppi and pictures to be professionally printed should have 300 ppi.

FLASH: 2D animation created in Flash can have an .swf extension for Web sites or an .exe extension for digital presentations. You need Flash Player installed on your computer to see SWF files.

FRAMES: Two or more HTML pages combined within a single browser screen lets you have scrolling regions on different sections of the Web page.

FTP: File Transfer Protocol for downloading or uploading files from or to computers with an appropriate FTP program or Internet browser.

HOST: The physical computer where files that make up your Web site are located, and whose contents can be accessed via TCP/IP.

HTML: Hyper Text Markup Language. The language for creating Web pages.

IP ADDRESS: Internet Protocol Address. Every device connected to the Internet has a unique IP address.

JAVA: A programming language by Sun Microsystems for writing Java applets.

JAVASCRIPT: This scripting language can be embedded in HTML pages or accessed by them as an external document (file type =.js) to create effects, validate forms, etc.

JPEG: Joint Photographic Experts Group. A compressed image file.

KERNING: Horizontal spacing between letter pairs.

LEADING: Vertical spacing between the baselines under text in a paragraph or list.

META DATA/TAG: Part of the backend, thus not visible to the viewer, of an HTML page providing descriptions and keywords for optimizing search engines.

MYSQL: An open source relational database management system that uses SQL (Structured Query Language).

ORGANIC SEO: The optimizing of search engines by obtaining one-way links from other Web sites without actively submitting your site.

PERL: Practical Extracting and Reporting Language.

PIXEL: The smallest component, or single grid point, of a raster image.

PHP: An open source programming language that enables Web pages to be created dynamically, or access information from a database. It is widely used in conjunction with MySQL.

PLUG-IN: A small application, like Adobe Flash Player, that is installed and used as an added feature by your Web browser.

ROLL OVERS: Graphics that move or change when your mouse passes over them.

SERP: Search Engine Results Page.

TAG: Often called Markup tags or HTML tags, these are used to define parts of Web pages so that they display correctly for the site visitor.

URL: Uniform Resource Locator, the address of a Web page or file.

W3C: World Wide Web Consortium is a group of companies that set international standards for HTML and the Web.

WYSIWYG: What You See Is What You Get.

XHTML: Once planned as a successor to HTML 4.0, it is a hybrid of HTML and XML.

XML: Extensible Markup Language allows you to create custom tags.

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Today there are plenty of web hosting control panels out there. Linux and Windows both have a selection of panels suited to different server environments. Both operating systems also have a number of both free and paid solutions, so there is indeed a panel for every aspiring web host out there.

One of the most popular Unix web host control panels is cPanel. This control panel is a proprietary system- and licenses can run as much as $425 per year. Developers of cPanel have also created a mirror software platform that runs on Windows, so it can be used by virtually any server type. cPanel has a low learning curve, making it perfect for first-time web hosts.

The open source movement is everywhere- and that includes the web hosting community! Webmin is an example of an open source software package for Unix systems. Webmin also has modules such as Virtualmin and Usermin to extend the functionality of the core hosting panel. Users agree that making modifications to Webmin is painless- and it’s selling feature.

GNUPanel is another open source software package that is written mainly in PHP 5. It has several modern features, such as accepting payments via third parties such as PayPal. This panel in particular mimics similar auto-installation technologies present in cPanel; users are able to install popular applications such as WordPress at the click of a mouse. This makes GNUPanel a favorite among hosts that intend on having less technology-gifted clients who don’t necessarily know how to install and build their website.

Another licensed alternative would be Plesk. Plesk is an alternative to cPanel, as it matches it in terms of speed, security, and features. Each year the two battle it out to improve upon their original designs, but mostly the differences occur within the interface and the licensing costs. One odd thing about cPanel is separating the WHM and administrator panel- which takes some growing accustomed to for those new to the separate systems.

Not all web hosting panels are created for general tasks. An example with a specific-need web host panel would be InterWorx. This web hosting panel is all about managing clustered servers to conduct load balancing. This allows a website to store a massive amount of data, serve it out, and all without a hiccup in performance to the end user. These types of operations are necessary for large websites that do hundreds of thousands of pages served each day. The general web host doesn’t need to worry about it.

Closing Comments

There are many control panels to pick from. Whether you need a specific price, server environment, or feature set- there are free demonstrations available from all reputable panel developers. Take the time to try out each one and make a solid decision on who to pick.

Learn more on missouri web hosting and missouri web development.

By reviewing and looking at BlueHost.com’s website, it’s easy to see that this company will be around. They put together a serious, professional web-hosting service with all the right stuff. The site’s design works well, as the features are laid-out & easy on the eyes. I even found their contact-information easily, which was a plus for user-related questions or problems. BlueHost has tons of awards from the online industry validating their hosting services. There’s a demo of their control panel, for beginners to learn how cPanel works. They built their control panel to be easily used. The demos on how cPanel works are geared for beginners & advanced users. (nicely done)

BlueHost’s Featured Components and Pricing

The featured components are pretty straight-forward (& nothing’s missing). All the important and expected features are there and very easy to find and work-with:

* cPanel / including DEMOS * multiple database support * FTP * Email I found something unique and it was the BlueHost’s package featuring unlimited disk-space, and unlimited band-width.

There is a limited number of databases (50 each for MySQL and Postgre) and they’re providing more FTP and email accounts than anyone could ever use (1,000 and 2500, respectively). They’re giving unlimited numbers of addon domains, parked domains, and sub-domains as well. Pricing varies & depends on how long you sign up for:

* 3 Months: $9.95/month + a $30.00 Setup fee. *The Domain isn’t included. ($10.00 if purchased from BlueHost)

* 6 Months: $8.95/month + a $30.00 Setup fee. *The Domain isn’t included. ($10.00 if purchased from BlueHost)

* 12 Months: $7.95/month **Good Deal (no setup fee, free domain included) * 24 Months: $6.95/month ***Best Deal (no setup fee, free domain included)

I don’t like and usually don’t get the most minimum three month contract offers and it is not easy to find this option on their site. You have to click around to find it (it’s actually in the second step in their order process) It takes a little effort to find the prices and they are very competitive for long-term usage.

BlueHost’s Terms of Service

This web hosting company has a very straight-forward Terms of Service agreement, with little legal jargon. It’s a bullet point page with the major points listed in an easily-read formation. The one shady-point that I saw stated that “All activities may be monitored, recorded, and examined by any authorized person, including law enforcement.” The lesser semi-shady point I found states “Any violation found or fraudulent activity that system personnel deem inappropriate may have your account immediately terminated without notice and any recorded evidence reported to authorized persons.” To be fair to BlueHost, the points are actually quite clear, and not hidden inside of a 10 page agreement. *easy to find*

cPanel / Control Panel

It takes two clicks to get into the control panel & if you know about cPanel, it is standard. You have the SQL, your sub-domains, & your email-accounts, featured in the cPanel. There are also a few nice additions that include a domain manager, a site-builder, and the option to manage your account right within. Basically, you can log into their billing-dept. It’s a convenient feature.

The Fantastico at BlueHost is the latest version with all of the scripts. The cPanel was very quick and it performed everything it was supposed to do.

Script Installation

You can add your domains through add-on domain feature in cPanel. I added a few domains and everything seemed to work well, and without any problems. This hosting company doesn’t allow SSH/Shell Access by default, but they said they will enable shell access for your account if you fax a copy of your driver’s license, passport, or other ID to them. I installed a few basic scripts (a blog, a CMS, a forum) & didn’t have any problems. Their Speed was about average, and it seems to be keeping-up with all of the latest software updates.

Support Services

When I called the support department’s toll-free number, I was talking to someone within 30 seconds after dialing. I asked some basic questions: Do you support mod_rewrite (Yes), do you support mod_security (didn’t know, but checked), and do you keep your Fantastico up-to-date with the latest versions (Yes) The customer-rep was nice, and seemed to know what he was talking about. He wasn’t reading from a teleprompter. (There wasn’t any delay in his answers)

I had some other questions about some complicated issued that usually anyone can face. It took only couple of minutes and I was able to speak to a different representative. (They have more than one tech on duty, & that’s a great plus to get answers quickly) When I asked if they support PHP5 (they said they have two servers that do, and can move accounts if needed (or) desired. I also asked if they support Ruby on Rails (No), and if I should use ‘localhost’ as my host name with the script I was trying to install (Yes). I reworded my questions to test the email-support system. It only took 22 minutes to receive their answer. It was impressive, because it was already late in the afternoon, approaching closing-time for most people.

After performing my review, I’ve found BlueHost to be a solid web host service. This company has their act together and deserves their listing as a top quality web host. Their impressive functionality and solid support-staff make this company an easy choice for beginners & advanced users alike. In all, very user-friendly & a solid experience.

The Good: Good control panel functions: (cPanel) has a few nice extras. There’s plenty of space and bandwidth, good customer-support, & fair pricing.

The Bad: a few Semi-shady points in the TOS (nothing too sinister, & clearly outlined) Their 3 month minimum contract price is kind of hard to find, but its there.

Jacqueline Gharibian is the author. . She has done an extensive research and review about BlueHost web hosting. To read more reviews about other web hosting companies and also other products, please visit her site at ReviewTheWeb.