About domain name registration

A domain name is a little piece of real estate on the internet. it points to your website, much like an address points to your business.

A domain name can be up to 63 characters long. This includes the charachters used for the tp level domain (e.g: .com .net .edu .biz)

Registering a domain name is easy - just follow the instructions given to you on screen.

Acceptable characters are:

• The numbers 0 through to 9
• Any letter of the alphabet
• The 'dash' character (-)

Not accepted characters are:

• The space character
• Any special character (e.g: %&*+ is not accepted)
• Two or more consecutive dashes (e.g: -- is not accepted)

Web hosting allows you to put a page or site. the first page is like the entry to your house if is a personal page, or an entry to a store

There are free hosting site available, but beware - you get what you pay for. Free hosting will usually put banners on your site to recoup costs associated with upkeeping your site.

When paying for hosting, try to match a plan with your needs. Don't pay for 10gb of hosting space if you dont need it, unless that really is part of the lower end plan.

Most web hosts guarantee between 90%-99.9% uptime. this can make a lot of difference, 10% of one day is about 14 minutes. so if your website is only up for 90% of the time, you lose 14 minutes for potential customers.

You can host from your own server, but if you are not a large organisation, we recommend that you don't. the setup and maintainece costs will be far higher than if you pay for hosting, and have your website hosted there,