We cater to a variety of clients here at the nest. A portion of them have never had a website before and are confused about what they need, and rightfully so. There are thousands of acronyms and lots of marketing jargon cluttering the web. We like to make sure our clients understand the two integral pieces that comprise every website.
A website needs to exist somewhere. Website hosting gives people the ability to rent out space in a web server, without having to buy and maintain a server themselves. A server is named for it's ability to serve web content to those who seek it through a browser, such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome or Safari.
Hosting plans can vary greatly in price. Some are advertised as dirt cheap for as little as three to five dollars per month. Others can be hundreds, or even thousands of dollars per month. The vast discrepancy in prices relates to a number of factors, including server resource available to your website, technical support, software features for managing your website, etc.
Dirt-cheap hosting comes at a cost, generally including less reliable up-time, limited resources and sometimes the inability to add additional features when you may decide to grow your website. In fact, we have monitored websites hosted on some of these bargain plans and seen proof of the additional down-time and poor support, which could be potential customers or productivity lost. These costs can easily be justified by spending a bit more on a quality hosting plan.
Most quality hosting packages tend to fall somewhere between $10 to $50 per month. Spending more than $50 usually mean an anticipation of a large volume of traffic and very large resource requirements, a scope which means a company is already dedicating a lot of additional resources to maintain a web presence.
We offer a hosting plan of $20 per month, which many of our clients have found to be very useful because it allows the development and maintenance of their site to take place under one roof - providing for a single point of contact for any questions or concerns. Our intimate knowledge of the hosting environment also allows us to make changes much more efficiently, which is another big time and money saver in the long-run for our clients.
A domain is a website's name, such as www.example.com.
In order to secure a domain and make sure no one else can claim it, you have to register a domain name. Some hosting providers may offer one free domain registration when purchasing a hosting plan, like we do. Otherwise, domains typically cost about $10-$20 per year. If you see a domain selling for a large amount of money, someone likely owns that domain and has either established traffic, or has a short, generally-termed domain. Spending lots of money on a domain won't guarantee traffic. A good name alone has very little to do with why people visit a site. With a little brainstorming, anyone can come up with a solid domain name.
Hopefully you now know a bit more what hosting are domains are. If you have additional questions please don't hesitate to contact us. If you are ready to get everything setup, you can signup for hosting in a matter of minutes!