Without disclosing the confidential side of the discussion, here's a recent checklist set of questions and some suggestions about hosting and domain name acquistion I had with a potential client. Not all of the following may apply to your situation and you should explore several options and opinions before settling on a web marketing approach.....
1
You want to have a full website under the banner of xXxXxXx.com
This domain name may or may not be available. Along with this domain name you should also acquire the .co, .net, .org, .info and .mobi extensions. You might also consider the .me, .name, .biz, .us and .tv extensions. All of the other extensions would be parked domains that would automatically redirect to the .com extension.
With the domain registrar that I use (been around a long time and are very reputable) the costs for such acquisitions (business expense) on a yearly basis are as follows:
| .com | .co | .net | .org | .info | .biz | .us | .tv | .mobi | .me | .name |
| $14.99 | $12.99 | $14.99 | $14.99 | $2.99 | $9.99 | $9.99 | $29.99 | $11.95 | $9.95 | $14.95 |
It would be good to acquire the domain names for a period of 5 years, but that is a lot of initial outlay.
In my opinion going for a deal that includes a domain name in the cost of hosting is dubious, as in most cases the domain name belongs to the hosting company not you. Any future disputes surrounding support or even leaving that hosting company could result in the loss of the domain and your on-line identity.
Do your own research on this, but I do recommend dotster.com for this service.
Here is a link that has the search
Dotster | Domain Registration and Website Hosting Enter your preferred domain name and explore the results
2
You will need to secure webhosting to support it. Webhosting deals are variable and some great deals at the outset will come back to bite you on renewal, charging almost triple what you initially paid.
I recommend and use
WebHostingPad.com .
At $1.99 per month over a 5 year contract for a regular site and $3.99 per month over a 5 year contract for secure site access, they are hard to beat, they also offer a free domain name with the deal, so select something other than
the dot.com extension to reduce your costs (certain extensions are not available under this deal).
3
If you intend to sell using paypal, you will need to expand your paypal account to be either a premium personal account or create a new business account. Remember that any costs are business expenses and are able to be written off against the cost of running the business
4
Generally you will require the following initial services
- Graphic design
- Application development
- Mobile app eventually
- Flash player
- Related e-commerce integration
- Editors for
- player playlists
- e-commerce price updates
- Page development
And the following on-going services or training to do for yourself.
- Accessing daily and weekly analytics
- Page re-development
- Application upgrades
- Editor upgrades
- Blog development
5
Any purchasing for domain names, web hosting, etc needs to be done by you as for the most part you are the identified owner/contractor in the agreements that ensue from these purchases.
