Business website, domain registration etc

firsttimebuyer2013

My girlfriend is starting a small business from home and needs a website.

At the moment paying for a professionaly designed one is out of our budget so we're going the home built route. Actual design and styles we'll be fine with but I wouldn't know how to 'build' a website.

I have a few questions if anyone can answer?

1) Who should we register with and what's the cheapest way of getting professional email addresses, ie info@buisnessname.com?

2) When your annual registration is up, what do these companies charge you to re-register? Can they charge you £500 to renew, for example?

3) Do these registrations include hosting, or is there a monthly cost to this on top?

4) And what sort of protection do we need on top?

Just briefly looking at GoDaddy it seems there's loads of extras but we're unsure of what we need.

Thanks for any help.

AndyPix

1. I use godaddy and 1&1 and can recommend them both.
When you register your domain name eg mybusiness.com , you can then create email addresses related to your domain ..eg [EMAIL="sales@mybusiness.com"]sales@mybusiness.com[/EMAIL] , [EMAIL="info@mybusiness.com"]info@mybusiness.com[/EMAIL] etc etc


2. Yes you do have to re-register. But its roughly the same price as the deal you take at the start. There wouldnt be any massive nasty surprises.


3. You can register a domain, or hosting, or a combination of both (which it sounds like would suit you)
1&1 website builder is part of their package and can produce pretty good results for a beginner. Its just basicall drag and drop stuff to your page.


4. I would suggest you dont need anything over the top of that


Dont bother with the extras , here is a package i would suggest (and do use myself)


https://www.1and1.co.uk/website-builder-packages?__lf=Order-Product


I would suggest the basic package , unless you need e-commerce etc

deskhelp

As answered above you need to take care of domain not getting expired as its hardly 10GBP per year max you will have to pay for renewal and re-registration can cause huge sum of amount one of my client had to pay upto 300GBP.

Regards Domain registration and hosting you can buy them from same host which I do myself with Webhost UK offers one of the cheap and reliable hosting , previously I have tried godaddy but there support is really one of the worst support in service industry so avoid them at any cost.
Personally I am not big fan of huge companies like 1and1 and godaddy as they oversell their resources which results in downtime and their slow support adds to the pain.. being in this industry for more than 10 years I feel its good to say away from such companies and find long term reliable hosting partner. I also use Rshosting and Webhosting UK as other options for my requirements.

chunter

With 123reg, 1and1, godaddy and the other big boys (regarding hosting), you generally find that the headline price is cheap but that the extras mount up, and you have these extras every year. They make their money on those extras. And a lot at that.

Use one of these to register the domain. This has to be renewed, usually every year. My own preference used to be 123reg, but they became unbelievably expensive overnight.
I then moved to namecheap across the Atlantic, but the British pound is gradually collapsing, so my .coms may all have to come home.

Rather than getting nailed every year, there are a few £20 annual hosting packages out there that will give you a gigabyte of space - for IMAP email storage more than for the website (it will be tiny).

Once you get the nameservers changed, you can install Wordpress or some other CMS and you can rattle away yourself.

I would suggest paying someone 20 or 30 quid to sort all that out on a one-off basis. The whole thing can be done with a few minutes work (over a period of time), so you have it all set up properly.
Then all you need to do is learn Wordpress or whatever.

Remember that any website today needs to responsive, and needs to look good on whatever device it's being viewed on. Otherwise it may be more of a hindrance than a help.

chunter

Clever spam, but spam all the same. About once a week he throws in a link to the people above.