There is lots and lots of advice out there about how to choose a domain name. First things first though you need to decide which TLD or ccTLD. TLD includes .com, .net, .org, .info, .eu etc, ccTLD is country specific such as .co.uk (UK), .de (Germany) or .ie (Ireland). Most people tend to want to go for a .com, but getting the domain name you really want maybe more difficult as many .com’s have already been registered. Going for a country specific domain will mean you have a better chance of getting what you want and it immediately tells others where you are based.
Once you’ve decided on TLD or ccTLD then you need to register your name or business name, try and keep this as short and simple as possible, so that again people can see exactly who you are. If you’re Jack Roberts the plumber then you need to think about what people currently know you buy and or what do you want to be known by. Here are some examples – www.jackrobertsplumbing.co.uk or jrplumbing.co.uk or jacksplumbing.co.uk
This sounds very simple doesn’t it. However you then need to think about your email address, again you want to keep it simple and easy to remember. This now sounds really basic, but you will probably have to tell lots of people your email address and you don’t want to be spelling it out every time. For example jackroberts@jackrobertsplumbers.co.uk is going to be a mouthful, whereas jack@jcplumbers.co.uk could be a bit easier to communicate. If you need some more help deciding try this web hosting blog. The great thing aout choosing your own domain is that you can then setup any email address you like, sales@jcplumbers.co.uk, info@jcplumbers.co.uk, accounts@jcplumbers.co.uk etc etc etc
Whatever you decide just remember to use a little common sense and keep it simple. Its worth spending the time to get it right first time.
With so much free email about, gmail, hotmail etc etc why bother with hosting your own email, surely you can’t get better than free!
Firstly one major advantage to hosting your own email is that you get to choose exactly what you want for an email address, provided you have bought the domain you want. There is nothing worse that seeing a business email address like johnscapenters@hotmail.com. With your own domain you can have multiple email addresses such as Info@domain.com, Sales@domain.com and John@domain.com.
Secondly you can manage all these emails addresses exactly as you want, redirect email addresses, point all the email addresses to one email, set auto replies, have multiple users, this list goes on and on.
Thirdly, you have peace of mind that your data is secure and private!
Registering a domain and hosting as many emails as you like typically would cost approx. $50.00 per year. Great value when you think you will have the email address you want, looks professional and you have full control…..
Firstly what is Office 365? Office 365 is secure, anywhere access to emails and calendars, office web apps, instant messaging, conference and file sharing.
Lots of hype in the press and in the market seems to indicate that companies should be saving significant amount of money by moving to the cloud. In reality this is not really the case, more often than not a cloud solution maybe even more expensive than the existing solution. However, when comparing apples with apples it maybe that a cloud computing solution offers far more functionality, scalability and availability.
But don’t be caught up in the hype, cloud computing is rarely cheaper. But then cheap is not good; As they say you ‘Pay For What You Get’
You maybe thinking should I be moving to the Cloud or using some sort of Cloud Computing?
Well Cloud Computing technology is being embraced by web hosting companies because it can deliver real benefits to their customers and offer great value for money. The biggest benefit is that cloud hosting can be set up very quickly and can scale to your business demands instantly, in addition you normally pay only for the resources that you really need.
To give an example a typical Cloud Server could be provisioned with 1 Core (CPU), 2GB RAM, 30GB Disk Space and 1TB Bandwidth could cost as little as €1.92 per day.
The brief the main benefits are:
- Instant Setup, no waiting around for hardware, usually setup is with in a few minutes rather than days.
- Fully Scalable and so you can meet the growing demands of your business.
- Highly Available, so you always have the resources you need on hand.
- Very Secure as data is backed up over multiple servers, although we would always recommend additional backup.
- You have control and can manage resources as needed, especially important if you are a start-up or your business is seasonal.
- Usually no contract, so you’re not tied into a long term commitment.
If you are looking to host your website you could be wondering, should I have a shared hosting account, a VPS hosting account or a dedicated server?
The first difference you will notice is the cost varies dramatically.
Pricing
Shared Hosting prices can range from £19.99 to over £100.00 per annum.
VPS Hosting prices vary from £39.99 to approx £69.99 per month
Dedicated Servers are a different league entirely, ranging from £150.00 per month to around £1000.00 per month.
Shared Hosting
Shared hosting would be the most common hosting account purchased, a good starting place for any website. But the negatives include sharing your hosting space and ip address with unknown neighbors. If these “neighbors” decide to use their hosting account for spam or phishing you can end up with an ip address being blacklisted by Google which will negatively impact your search results.
VPS Hosting
VPS Hosting would be the next step up, you are still sharing your resources with x amount of unknown users but you do have a lot more control over what is happening in your webspace. With many VPS hosting accounts you can upgrade RAM and CPU limits almost instantly.
Dedicated Servers
Dedicated Servers – a dedicated server provides your company with it’s own machine in the data canter. It is not shared with any other users and you have your own ip address. It is by far the most secure of hosting types if you are storing sensitive data and can be upgraded and monitored easily. Managed dedicated servers are normally the most popular as this way you have trained staff managing any upgrades or maintenance of your account.
Some of the benefits of a dedicated server include :
As the entire servers resources are dedicated to your website, load times decrease dramatically.
Since you are not sharing your server with other users who may be testing new scripts that could potentially crash the server, your reliability increases.
Security risks are lessened since access to a dedicated server is limited.
Configurable hardware means you can upgrade your dedicated server at any point.
Custom Firewall protection enables you to run and enforce your own access control policy.
If you have a dedicated server let us know who it is with and how you find the service.
If you require assistance in getting your business online or developing your ecommerce strategy you may want to consider using the expertise of a non executive director in your company. A non executive director with skills in building scalable businesses online could really make the difference to your business. In addition, a non executive director could add to significant improvement in your overall business performance, assisting with neutral objective decision making.
How do mail servers work?
How do mail servers know where to send your mail?
Mail servers are often described as electronic post offices. They receive, sort and deliver your email and attachments to the address the sender specifies.
Each and every hosting provider and ISP(Internet Service Provider) will be running a mail server program on each of their servers. As soon as you click “Send” on your completed email. Your hosting provider (or ISP depending on your outgoing server settings) will receive your email request.
The first step is to find out where your email is going to, obviously this is obtained through the destination email address you have entered.
From the destination email address the mail server will take out the domain name (e.g xmmailserver.com in our case)
From this domain name the mail server can now obtain a destination IP address. Every domain name that can accept email has an IP address record called an MX record. This tells the mail server which IP address to send the email to.
This destination server will be another hosting companies or ISP’s mail server which in turn will take the mail, find the matching mail account and place the mail into the correct mailbox based on the destination email address.