Domain Registration & Webhosting?

[Proco]

My wife is in the process of starting a business (she's still working on her business plan) and is looking ahead to email & website considerations.

The first step, obviously, will be registering a domain that fits for her business. Once that's done, the question is what to do about the email address(es) and website. I can think of two avenues she can take:
1 - Host the website with our ISP and have her URL resolve to that. The question I have about this method is can we create email addresses like "me@mybiz.com" and have them come in through our normal email?
2 - Go with a web hosting company. While we'll certainly be able to create the "me@mybiz.com" addresses, again will we be able to route the email to our home email?

Also, I'd love to hear suggestions for web hosting companies. I know of a few (GoDaddy, Register, Network Solutions) and have done some preliminary investigations. However, I find myself getting confused when trying to compare what we'd be getting for the money. We won't be looking to do anything fancy with the website ... at least not right away. Maybe someday there will be a shopping cart, but that might be it.

Thanks!!
Mike

[daronspicher]

I've had success with Godaddy (so far). Once all my sites were down and their tech guy was argueing that he could hit them from his computer, so everything is fine. I told him I have friends in Utah and New York City on IM and neither of them can hit my sites and I can't either. Must be a problem with my ISP??? and with theirs in NYC and Utah?

Must be a problem with IE? Um... it wasn't a problem with IE yesterday... I didn't change any of my sites or change anything with my IE.....

I told them we were going bare knuckles if my site wasn't up when I got back in to town on Monday.... On monday, it was all working great. Again, I didn't change my ISP or my IE, so what gives?

Anyhow, that was one incident in a year of hosting. I've had some ventures online less successful than the others that were also not successful, but it's fun to try.

As far as being able to get domains, domain hosting space and email accounts, that all works pretty well through them. I even taught myself php and have gone pretty much exclusively to data driven pages for everything now.

[ibcs]

We have all of our customers using GoDaddy with no problems.

[Godiva]

I use register.com to register my different domains.

I use a webhost for the websites. http://www.addr.com/ You get e-mail addresses to match your domain, they'll forward mail, they 'll even design your website. Various services.

I also have a .mac account.

[ohershey]

We've had really good results with 1and1 (www.1and1.com). They may, however, be overkill for you. They have incredibly responsive tech support and redundant hosting from different server locations, so they can re-route and have your site up usually in a few minutes, so I'm a big fan.

Most ISPs and web hosting companies can set up a pop3 or IMAP hosting for your domain's e-mail. You should be able to get your e-mail from your machine whichever hosting method you choose. Some ISPs don't support IMAP, which I think is a bummer. Use IMAP if you can get it, with Thunderbird as the desktop client - it seemed to be the best IMAP client when we tested them.

If you are talking strictly small scale, you might consider using Paypal to handle the transactions - It's simple and doesn't necessarily need anything on your site to function.

[eagle33199]

From my experience, GoDaddy isn't all that great... for example, if you try to implement clean URL's, it gags because they don't have it enabled on their servers, and their tech support won't help you because it's "a programming problem" (when in reality it's a configuration problem...).

Anyways, if you go with option 1, hosting it yourself, You can certainly point a domain at your computer (although you may have to use something like www.no-ip.com if you don't have a static IP address), and then it's not terribly difficult to set up the computer to act as a mail server as well. You'll want to check with your ISP before going down this route, however. Some of them block certain ports (like port 80) for "security reasons", which would pretty much kill this idea.

With either option, just about every mail server out there now a days has an e-mail forwarding option, so it shouldn't be too difficult to forward your e-mail from me@mybiz.com to me@aol.com or whatever you want. Be warned, however, that if you put the e-mail address on your website, odds are you'll start getting junk in it pretty quickly...

[fshagan]

I've been hosting websites now since 1999, and in the interest of full disclosure, sell both domain names and web hosting. In my opinion, you have two ways to go.

First, what not to do. You should avoid hosting a business site on your ISPs free web space, as it "brands" your business as a home business. You should avoid pointing your domain name through a IP service at your home computer because it is, most likely, against your agreement with your ISP. Besides which, do you really want your business website subject to the potential disasters at home? No, you do not.

Decide what you need the web site to do.

Static site:
Is it mainly an on-line advertisement for the business? Where you will have a home page, an "about us" type of page, and maybe several pages describing your product or service? You can have a site like that very economically if you are willing to learn to do the programming yourself. On a linux server, a site like that will rarely take up more than 10MB of disk space. You can get reliable hosting on a shared server for under $4 a month. My basic plan is $3.40, and I have several customers with small business sites like that.

Dynamic site:
Do you need to sell products on-line? Do you want to have a trouble-ticket system for customers to log on and enter their issues, and have the site notify you via email or text message? If your site has to do more, expect to pay more, up to $6 to $10 per month. I offer larger plans that do that, and so does Yahoo, which I've heard very good things about.

Once you decide what the site has to do, you can shop for a host. Here's a tip: find out if you can see the uptime records for the server you will be on. Many of the servers are oversold, and experience downtime and "slow response" that will drive you crazy. Ignore "uptime guarantees" and focus on the real time uptime reports that every host should be able to provide for you.

If you think your site will grow, check to make sure you can expand the account later. Moving a site is a chore, so if you can upgrade in place, it makes it much easier.

Buying a domain name:
Dealer's choice here. It used to matter which registrar you went with, as they could effectively "hijack" your domain name and make it difficult to move. But I and many others petitioned ICAAN to make domain names more portable, and now, registrars cannot keep you from moving your domain name to another service. GoDaddy is fine for buying a domain name, but they really crowd their servers with thousands of sites, so I would avoid buying a web site from them. Expect to pay from $7 to $10 per year for a domain name; go for a .COM name if you can find one that's appropriate (PM me if you want help with this).

You keep your domain name as long as you want, and don't have to have it tied to a web hosting plan. Give yourself the flexibility to move from your host if they don't satisfy you, so I usually tell people to avoid the "Free Domain Name with a Year of Hosting!" specials ... you are locked in to that host for a year, and they may own the domain name.



Oh, one other thing you asked about: email.

Most ISPs now block port 25 for outgoing email so you probably won't be able to use your web account's email server to SEND messages out. You can receive messages from it fine, but all the major ISPs block outgoing mail except through their own servers to limit spam (doesn't seem to be working, does it?)

So you have two choices: you can reply on-line to each email, or use the "reply-to" header in your email program to make it look like your reply is coming from your server.

Using webmail to do it all on-line is do-able, but its more convenient to use your regular mail reader (outlook express or Thunderbird). To do that, you set up your "name@bizname.com" email address in your email program and download email from your web account onto your home computer. To reply to those emails, you need to use your ISPs email account, just like you do for your regular email addresses. In your email program there is a setting you can make to the "reply-to" header so the recipient sees "name@bizname.com" in the header of the email. Most users never know that the email really came from your ISP email server.

[HTMLSpinnr]

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(fshagan @ Jul 20 2007, 11:40 PM) [snapback]482685[/snapback]</div>

Oh, one other thing you asked about: email.

Most ISPs now block port 25 for outgoing email so you probably won't be able to use your web account's email server to SEND messages out. You can receive messages from it fine, but all the major ISPs block outgoing mail except through their own servers to limit spam (doesn't seem to be working, does it?)

So you have two choices: you can reply on-line to each email, or use the "reply-to" header in your email program to make it look like your reply is coming from your server.

Using webmail to do it all on-line is do-able, but its more convenient to use your regular mail reader (outlook express or Thunderbird). To do that, you set up your "name@bizname.com" email address in your email program and download email from your web account onto your home computer. To reply to those emails, you need to use your ISPs email account, just like you do for your regular email addresses. In your email program there is a setting you can make to the "reply-to" header so the recipient sees "name@bizname.com" in the header of the email. Most users never know that the email really came from your ISP email server.
[/b]

As someone in the industry, I've found there are a couple of ways around this.

With the "reply-to" solution, the "From" address is still going to be the primary web account. Setting the real "From" address would be the preferred method. Most ISP's SMTP servers don't check the "From" address. Therefore, it's possible to use a separate account/profile (i.e. Thunderbird) w/ a dedicated "From" address while still using your ISP's outgoing SMTP server.

One other thing I've done w/ the small hosting setup I run for a boss/friend on the side is we keep an alternate port (i.e. 587) and require SMTP auth with SSL.

Most customers don't have a problem with either solution.