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Web hosting is a seemingly complex topic that small business owners can sometimes feel confounded by. When the techie on a message board offhandedly mentions IP addresses, domain names, and the type of hosting plan your business needs, you might be ready to head for the hills! Don't be overburdened by the unfamiliar jargon. It's really very simple.

Before you get any type of web hosting plan, you need to register a domain name. You can create a free account at one of the accredited domain registrars like Directnic, Moniker, or Godaddy.

Next, use their search box to see if the domain you want is already taken by someone else, or is still available. Most generic domain names, i.e., dictionary words and names are already taken. However, just because someone has registered the .com version of a popular name, doesn't mean that you can't get the same name without the .com. For instance, you might be able to get laptops.org or laptops.cc. When you run a search for laptops, it will tell you what extensions are available, e.g., .com, .net, .org, .cc, .ws, .name, etc. Each have different technical meanings, but you can use them interchangeably, at least for now. A .com is a company, a .org is an organization, and a .ws represents a website, etc.

There are many choices for web hosting companies available and for blogging there are many free choices offered as well. The question that comes to mind to me is, “Is free webhosting cheap?” What I mean by that is what is it going to cost me in terms of functionality and accessibility. Let’s take a look at some of the comparisons between free web hosting and paid web hosting.

Unless you have been living under a rock for the last couple of years then you know that blogging has become a formidable force on the internet and has allowed many people to get an online presence that may otherwise have been unable to do so. Many of these people are making their living by blogging and some like Jason Calcanis have become wealthy from it. Jason built a network of blogs over about eighteen months and sold them to AOL for nearly $30 million! That’s a pretty good ROI. Anyway, I digress, back to our discussion on web hosting.

If you have decided that you want to operate a blog your next choice will probably be what blogging platform or software you want to use to accomplish you blogging. Relax, it’s easy. Most of the blogging software out there today is open source which means it’s, you guessed it, free! In this instance free is not a bad thing, I use Wordpress almost exclusively, it is free and has more options that I care to learn or use. There are other blogging software options available, but I won’t go into them here because this article is about web hosting.

A domain name represents the unique name assigned to an organization or individual on the Internet. For instance, we are all familiar with names such as google.com, microsoft.com, and so on.

A particular name (domain) may only be owned by one person or company. To use an analogy, a domain represents your "street address" where you live on the Internet. It uniquely identifies where you can be found. Having a straight-forward, easy to remember domain is crucial to your business success.

The domain name is comprised of several parts. The last part of the domain (e.g., .com) is referred to as the top-level domain (TLD). In theory, the TLD represents a type of entity. For instance, .com stands for "commercial". It was originally meant to be for commercial enterprises (business), but that has become something of a misnomer as even people with personal websites use the .com TLD.

Other popular TLDs include:

Picking a domain name should be easy, right? Why, I’ll just use my business name. Not so fast, Sparky. A good bit of thought should be given to selecting a domain name.

A Cautionary Note

Picking a domain name is like getting married. You are going to have to stick with it till the bitter end. People that use your site will come to know it by the domain name. Repeat visitors will often simply type in the domain name to get to the site, better known as “type in traffic”. As an example, do you search for “Amazon” when you want to buy a book or do simply type in amazon.com? If Amazon were to change its domain name to Desert, there would be a lot of confusion. The same goes with your domain. Once you pick something, stick with it.