Domain Name Basics | Hosting Earn Money Ways

If you plan on having your own website, work from home and make money, you obviously will then need a domain name. And in order to have a website you need a hosting account. That's the foundation for internet marketing.

A hosting account is a company with many computer servers. It is from these servers that your website will reside on. And it is these servers that will present your website to the world. As a beginner, a shared server is all you need. What this means is, your website and many others will be hosted or reside on the same computer server. This is not a problem because these servers can handle such things. However, if you should end up getting really big, you may look into renting a server all for yourself. But this is definitely not needed for the beginner. Shared hosting is all you need.

There are literally hundreds of hosting companies available to host your website for you. Like in anything else, some are good and some not so good. A quick search in a search engine can provide you with many hosting companies. I just did a search for “hosting account” and got over 25 million pages. So you shouldn’t have trouble finding a hosting account. I personally have two hosting accounts. Listing them alphabetically they are, Black Wire Hosting (blackwirehosting.com), and Cheap Web Mall (cheapwebmall.com). But other gurus use Host Gator (hostgator.com) and 1&1 (1and1.com), although I have no experience with them. It is not necessary to have so many hosing accounts; one is all you really need. It just turned out that I got two almost by accident. I find the customer service of Cheap Web Mall especially handy talking to a live person 24/7.

Now hosting will cost around nine or 10 dollars a month. You may get a discount if you pay annually. Some companies I’m sure cost less if you care to look for them but just be sure they’re reputable or it could be financially devastating for you later on once you become successful should they close down.

A domain name shouldn’t cost you more than $10 for the year and you can purchase (or register) your domain names, in most cases, from your hosting account. The minimum it should cost somebody annually is $130 for one domain name and hosting. You can pay the hosting monthly.

You will definitely need a domain name if you want hosting, but you do not need hosting to buy a domain name. When you buy hosting, they will ask you to pick a domain name. Whatever domain name you choose (that’s available), will become your ‘primary domain name’ with that hosting company. All other domain names and websites that you may end up getting later will be subdirectories to this primary domain name, unless you purchase other hosting accounts (you can buy as many hosting accounts as you want, but you only need one as a beginner). If later you want to, you should be able to designate another domain name as your primary domain name, so you can change them whenever you want, but you must always have a primary domain name if you have a hosting account.

Under this one hosting account, you can have as many domain names, and as many websites as the hosting plan you bought allows. My $9 a month Linux plan allows me at least a hundred websites or more if I like. They will all be subdirectories off my primary domain name, which is the main or root directory for your hosting account. As an example, Earn Money Ways dot com is a subdirectory of my primary domain name, and you see how that URL looks (a URL is a web address).

I would also choose hosting your sites on a Linux server over a Windows server (if the hosting company gives you a choice). One good reason is it’s probably less expensive (mine’s $1 a month less), and perhaps less problems.

Once you have a domain name and a hosting account set up, you can upload a website to your designated server (which the hosting company will tell which server you’ll be on by the DNS (domain name server) they assign you), and your website will then be viewable on the World Wide Web from visitors around the world.

If you happen to have a domain name you purchased someplace else than where your hosting will be held, that’s okay. You’ll just point your domain name to the server the hosting company assigned you.

To learn more basics, here's an article titled The Basics of Internet Marketing you should find helpful. Click the title link.