Now that you have your plan, it's time to do the footwork to make your plans come to life. We now need to take care of all the things necessary to get your business started. In this section we'll discuss getting your domain name and hosting, forming the entity of your company, bank and merchant accounts, and everything else besides the actual website. We'll discuss that in the next stage.

Domain and Hosting

You can either host your site on your own server with a high speed connection and static IP address, or you can have it hosted for you. Having it hosted for you is far easier and, a more practical solution. If in the future you decide you would prefer to host yourself you can always re-direct your domain name, so for now we're going to talk about having your site hosted. The advantages are it's less expensive because you don't have to supply the equipment; a hosting company takes care of all the maintenance of the server, firewall, backing up your website, and making sure the internet connection stays up. It should cost you about $5-$50 a month depending on the hosting company and what type of server and features you want. That's for the common shared hosting. This means the hosting company has more than one website on each server. If you were to need a dedicated hosted server (you don't) that cost could climb into hundreds a month. You would only need a private server if your website is so popular that it requires 100% of the server's usage to support it.

There are lots of domain registrars and hosting companies out there, such as GoDaddy(currently the biggest web hosting company), Yahoo, 1and1, etc. Look for ones offering the best deals and features, with little or no downtime. Professional hosts should have 99.9% up time, meaning that they guarantee that your website will be accessible 99.9% of the time. Some offer features like the availability to “rent” a shopping cart instead of purchasing one. We'll discuss that in The Website. Pick a reputable hosting company. There have been horror stories about “fly by night” hosting companies holding domains and websites hostage and the owners being powerless to gain access to their own websites or transfer them to a different company.

You'll also have to decide what operating system you want for your server. The choice will be mostly based on the programming language of your website and shopping cart. The two most common options are Windows based hosting or Linux based hosting.

Once you decide on the hosting company, you will have to purchase your domain name. Most domain name registrars have an engine on their website where you can enter a domain name and find out if it already registered. If it is, most will offer you other available options. Try to stick with a .com domain name. While .net and .biz domains most likely have more domains still available, they are less common, and therefore less likely to be memorized. Chances are you will lose visitors to the .com version of your domain name as that's what most people remember. Many companies register the .com, .net, and even the .biz versions of their domains just to make sure no one else can register them and cash in on their branding. Prices for registering a domain name ranges from $5-$20 a year, often with discounts for registering for multiple years.

Make a list of your preferred .com names in order of desire, then enter them into a registrar engine until you find one you want that's available. Keep in mind you want your domain name to be something that's easy for your customers to remember.