6 Miscellaneous information on search engines (5)

6.5 Selecting a domain and hosting

   Currently, anyone can create a page on the Internet without incurring any expense. Also, there are companies providing free hosting services that will publish your page in return for their entitlement to display advertising on it. Many Internet service providers will also allow you to publish your page on their servers if you are their client. However, all these variations have serious drawbacks that you should seriously consider if you are creating a commercial project.

   First, and most importantly, you should obtain your own domain for the following reasons:

   - A project that does not have its own domain is regarded as a transient project. Indeed, why should 

we trust a resource if its owners are not even prepared to invest in the tiny sum required to create some sort of minimum corporate image? It is possible to publish free materials using resources based on free or ISP-based hosting, but any attempt to create a commercial project without your own domain is doomed to failure.

   - Your own domain allows you to choose your hosting provider. If necessary, you can move your site to another hosting provider at any time.

    Here are some useful tips for choosing a domain name.

   - Try to make it easy to remember and make sure there is only one way to pronounce and spell it.

   - Domains with the extension .com are the best choice to promote international projects in English. Domains from the zones .net, .org, .biz, etc., are available but less preferable.

   - If you want to promote a site with a national flavor, use a domain from the corresponding national zone. Use .de – for German sites, .it – for Italian sites, etc.

   - In the case of sites containing two or more languages, you should assign a separate domain to each language. National search engines are more likely to appreciate such an approach than subsections for various languages located on one site.

   A domain costs $10-20 a year, depending on the particular registration service and zone.

   You should take the following factors into consideration when choosing a hosting provider:

   - Access bandwidth.
   - Server uptime.
   - The cost of traffic per gigabyte and the amount of prepaid traffic.
   - The site is best located in the same geographical region as most of your expected visitors.

   The cost of hosting services for small projects is around $5-10 per month.

   Avoid “free” offers while choosing a domain and a hosting provider. Hosting providers sometimes offer free domains to their clients. Such domains are often registered not to you, but to the hosting company. The hosting provider will be the owner of the domain. This means that you will not be able to change the hosting service of your project, or you could even be forced to buy out your own domain at a premium price. Also, you should not register your domains via your hosting company. This may make moving your site to another hosting company more difficult even though you are the owner of your domain.