Credit: Domainsbot

Domains are so cheap these days that there is no excuse for n0t owning a dozen (or hundreds) of them. I personally own close to 1,000 domains. I am not a domainer and don’t make a living out of selling premium domain names. But there are advantages to owning all kinds of domains. Owning a domain portfolio can save bloggers time and money over the long run. It can also open doors of opportunity for those aiming to take their business to the next level.

Domains can cost you as low as $6 a year. Some premium domain registrars charge you much more but there is no reason to work with those companies. If you own 100 or 1000 domains, you could end up paying a substantial amount of money per year to keep them. You want to make sure you don’t register just any domain but those that are brandable and short. At the same time, you should think of your domains as investments. They may not pay you back today, but they will eventually if you are serious about your business. Here are 6 reasons you should start buying up domains today:

• Good domains are cheaper today: you are going to have a difficult time finding one word domain names these days. Those days are long gone. At the same time, you should buy any good domain that you can find today (those that may fit your future business plans). It may not be available for tomorrow. You can always buy premium domains but they will cost you much more than just $10 a year.
• Reserve your domain for future opportunities: let’s say you have a product idea but don’t have the time to implement it today. You don’t want to wait around and save $10 a year just to have someone else register your domain. I personally link my ideas to their respective domains. That way, every-time I go through my portfolio, I get reminded of projects I have always intended to tackle.
• Don’t forget the SEO benefits: parking your new domain is not going to have a major SEO benefit for you. But if you start a simple blog on your domain and pump content to it once in a while, that will count for something. Google does pay attention to your domain’s age, so the longer it is around, the better off you are.
• Set up temporary websites: going back to the previous point, you can position your temporary content to have your site show up for keywords relevant to your project. You should also take time to build links to your domains as they will come in handy when you are ready to pull the trigger on your project.
• Build and flip: if you know how to build killer websites, you can buy domains, build portals, and flip them for some cash. Some people are making serious money using this approach. The more you do this, the better you get at it and the more money you will make in less time.
• Sell premium domains: it is easy to assume that all premium domain names are taken. Even domainers miss some of those highly brandable domain names. If you can get your hands on them, you can sell them for a profit without doing much.

Domains are cheap. Sites such as 1&1 offer them for as low as $9 a year. Don’t get them now, and you may end up having to spend $1000 or more to get the very same domains. That’s not too smart, is it?

Credit: Stock.xchng

Most bloggers start their careers with shared hosting plans. Shared hosting plans are cheap and do the job for blogs in the early stages of the game. As soon as your blog starts getting a tiny bit of traffic, you’ll start realizing that your hosting plan may not be enough for you. Dedicated servers are expensive and can cost you a ton of money on a monthly basis. If you have enough revenue to cover the costs of those, then you may be able to justify going in that route. For most bloggers, a decent VPS hosting plan will do.

Not all VPS plans are created the same. Some companies are just more reliable than others. Before picking up a new host for your business, you want to do your research and find out more about the reputation and track-record of web hosts you are interested in working with. Choosing an expensive host for your blog would not necessarily guarantee 100% up-time or more speed for your websites. You can’t cut corners here.

Here are 4 advanced hosting plans that I have tested and found worth trying for bloggers:

Rackspace: brings the power of cloud to your business. No web host is perfect but Rackspace has an incredible track-record and is trusted by many businesses for its reliability of service.

VPS.net: the web server that we are switching to in the next few months. Our blog network has outgrown our previous web host. VPS.net offers us a lot of control and has a good reputation in the blogging world.

DreamHost: the first ever reliable host that I got to try a few years back. Our company has had our ups and downs with DreamHost. It is still a decent choice, considering the support that it offers.

Media Temple: Media Temple offers you a lot of bang for your buck. It is another virtual private server host with a decent track-record. Its plans are not that expensive. Good choice for small to medium size communities. I have not tested their dedicated server plans, so I can’t make a judgment on that.

Are you using a VPS service for your blog? Which company are you working with?

A lot of bloggers underestimate that lie in their path to blogging stardom. You can spend hours creating killer content for your blog, but if you do not choose the right web host for your blog, there is a good chance your blog could be down when your visitors come looking for information. Let me tell you that nothing turns me off than going to a website that is too slow or completely down. Many bloggers get started with free hosting services or cheap shared hosting. In reality, you should always plan on purchasing a premium web hosting service to your blog once you have hit 5-10K unique visitors per month. The last thing you want to do is negate your blog’s momentum by going with one of those cheap web hosts.

I personally started my blogs on one of those shared hosting services. I was paying $4 a month for my hosting and was happy with the service. But once I started pulling 15K a month, I realized my site was going down on a consistent basis. At first I thought it was a software issue. I got rid of most of my plug-ins and adopted lighter themes. I even stopped going overboard with images. But nothing worked. Finally, I realized the problem was my hosting and not my website. That’s why I switched to Dreamhost PS. Dreamhost PS is web hosting on demand. In essence, you can decide how much you want to pay every month and how much resources you want use on a monthly basis. So you can start cheap and add more resources as soon as you blog goes viral. That way you don’t end up spending $500 a month right away with your own dedicated service.  Don’t get me wrong. If you have a website that gets 1M hits a month, it’s better to go with private hosting, but you can buy a lot of time with an on-demand web hosting service such as Dreamhost PS.

What I love about Dreamhost PS is that it lets me know exactly how much memory and CPU power I am using on a daily basis, allowing me to easily figure out how much money I need to invest in my hosting. I can also use MySQL PS to get better performance from my DBs as well. Finally, Dreamhost PS lets me make a lot of changes to my PHP and Apache configuration that I couldn’t with my shared hosting account.

Should you go with Dreamhost PS?

I have worked with 4 other web hosts, and the only one that I can truly recommend is Dreamhost PS. It’s my current web host, and it has been for a while. The support that you get from the folks behind Dreamhost is superb, and the service is reliable. Best of all, you get a lot of discounts and goodies with each hosting account that makes going with Dreamhost a no-brainer. Are there better hosts out there? I can’t tell as I haven’t had to search for one in years.

How To Choose a Right Domain for your Blog?

You should always think about your readers before choosing a domain name for your blog. Your domain should be easy to remember and type for your readers. In addition, you should think about folks who assume every site is a .com domain. I bought a .net domain a few years ago and built my first business on it. Let’s say that was the biggest mistake I made. To make matters worse, the guy who bought the .com version of my domain has had success due to my efforts and is not asking for $50,000 to give it up.

Your domain should be short and memorable. eBay.com is a short and memorable domain name. mybestjobsonline.com is a too long, and it might not even pass Google’s filters. For those of you not familiar with Google’s filter on domains, it essentially flags your website if you are using a domain that is too long and looks to have been registered for SEO purposes only.

You should choose your domain name and expect it to be the permanent home for your blog. Moving to a new domain name is costly and should be avoided at all costs. Having said that, let’s see what tools you can use to register a new domain.

My Domain Registration Tool:

Domainsbot.com is the main tool that I use for my domain needs. It’s a very handy tool and can help you find some amazing combinations for your domains. It is easy to use and it doesn’t hurt that is completely Ajaxified.

MakeWords.com is another addictive tool that can help you find not so obvious domains names and avoid paying a premium to buy domains off of greedy domainers. The suggestion and dictionary tools are extremely helpful, and the fact that you can save your favorite domains is a big plus.

What’s Next?

Once you have decided on a name that you like for your blog, you should register .com, .net, .org, .us, and .info if you can afford it. The minimum should be .com and .net, if both are available. But if you are planning to dominate your niche, you cannot afford others registering the non .com extensions of your domain. You can register these domains for cheap on 1&1 or GoDaddy. I do not believe in sticking with one domain registration provider. That’s putting all your eggs in one basket. These domain companies are greedy too, and they will raise prices on their customers. By doing business with multiple domain companies, you can avoid getting stuck with higher fees.

Choosing a domain name is like choosing a name for your baby. Your domain name can be used as a branding tool, and it should be short and memorable enough. It’s tough to choose a one-word domain these days, but that doesn’t mean you should be lazy and choose any domain that comes to your mind.

A few days ago, I talked about the pains and challenges of finding a good web host for a blog. I have personally been through a whole lot of web hosts before settling down with Dream Host. In reality, no web host is perfect. All web hosting providers are going to suffer from outages, and every single company out there is going to have something that you won’t like. So, if you are too picky about your hosting service, you may want to get your own server.

I was guilty of being too picky when I got my first web hosting account. I remember I signed up for IX Web Hosting. At the time, IX Web Hosting was considered the best shared hosting service provider by most reputable sites. The hosting plans were rich and a whole lot of free bonuses were offered with each hosting plan. But I made the mistake of signing up for a Windows account than a Linux one. As great as WordPress is, it is not going to perform to its maximum on a Windows-based server. That’s just a fact. There are web hosts out there that offer compelling Windows hosting for WordPress. But, why would you want to use a MS hosting account for an open source CMS such as WordPress. My relationship with IX Web Hosting didn’t last more than a year as I was frustrated with all the issues that I had with WordPress on Windows. So if you are looking for a web host for your blog, make sure you understand the technologies that work the best with your blogging platform.

I then had a chance to work with 1&1 hosting. At first things were smooth, but 1&1 starting charging me twice for my domains, and WordPress started malfunctioning on their servers. When I asked their customer service about my issue, they told me that my theme folders were on one server and the rest of my WordPress blog was on another. I found that to be a strange explanation and a sign that things were not going to work out with 1&1. After a few months of going back and forth with the customer service, I decided to get out of my contract. I learned a couple of lessons from working with these guys:

• Never work with a company that makes it hard to cancel your service: if your web host makes it easy for people to sign up for an account, it should make it easy for them to cancel their accounts as well. If your host is trying to keep you on board by making the cancellation process impossible, then it just does not get the concept of customer service.
• Never work with a hosting provider that does not answer your questions properly on a timely fashion: when I signed up for 1&1 hosting plans, I was rushing into it due to a limited time promotion that they were running at the time. Had I contacted the customer service before signing up for 1&1′s hosting plan, I probably would have figured out if the decision to work with the company was the right decision for my business.

After 1&1, I spend a couple of months with a free hosting service. The hosting was actually great, but I wanted more support, and that’s how I got hooked up with Dream Host. Now, Dream Host’s shared hosting is not perfect, and there are minor issues that happen time to time. But, the service has been reliable, and it has met my criteria for a good web host:

• Great features
• Great price
• Great support
• Great documentation

Dream Host has the best support in the world. There is no doubt in my mind that is the case. I have never gone more than a couple of hours before getting an answer to my e-mails. They also let you call them, which is a plus. But what I like about the folks at Dream Host is the fact that they are straight with their customers. For instance, I wanted to run a social networking script on my hosting account, but the script was too slow. The folks at Dream Host told me that my hosting plan was not the right one for that script, and they offered to help me move to a better plan (they told me how much it would cost and why I should do it to get the best result). I call that great service.

At the end of the day, you need to do your due diligence before signing a contract with a web host. Dream Host has been very good to me, but I am sure there are a few other good hosts out there that offer great service to their customers. There is more to a good web host than a great name, and that’s the lesson I learned the hard way.

In the third part of this series, I will discuss things that you need to look for in a web hosting service before signing a contract with a hosting company. Stay tuned.

I would like to think of purchasing web hosting services as a long-term investment. You can try to be cheap and get a free web host, but do not expect your host to be there for you when you need them the most. At the end of the day, it all comes down to what you are planning to achieve with your blog. If your ultimate goal is to have multi-million dollar blog, then all roads lead to owning private servers for your business. But you should not start with private servers right out of the bat. But you should plan ahead to make sure your web host can handle the amount of traffic and hits that you will be bringing in. Believe me, you do not want a web host that is great in marketing but pathetic in customer service.

So what do you need to know about a web host before deciding whether it is good enough for your business? You should know how much traffic they can handle in the first place. You want to start with hosts that have 99.9% or better up-time reliability. Many companies claim to have that kind of reliability but you should definitely check authority sites such as Consumer Reports to find out more about your web host. In addition, you should check blogs and forums to find customer complaints and verify the host’s reputation.

You should also find about the features that the host is offering. Disk space and bandwidth are two factors that you should find out about before signing up for a web hosting service. You should also go for dedicated IP addresses if you have multiple blogs. Having the ability to host multiple external domains without any extra fees is a big plus here.

Your host of choosing should come with enough e-mail capabilities to help you manage your blog/business more effectively. Most web-hosts limit the number of e-mails you can have on your account. But as long as you have enough of them, you should not be too worried about it. But you want to sign up for a host that offers you POP3, IMAP, and HTTP e-mail access. I can’t remember the last time I read an e-mail without outlook, and that wouldn’t be possible without above e-mail protocols.

Your web host should support the latest programming scripts such as PHP 5, Ruby, and ASP.net (if you choose a Windows hosting account). Support for Flex and Cold Fusion would be necessary if you are building a Flash-based site, but WordPress and Blogger are not flash-based, so you will be fine without them.You want to make sure your host comes with database capabilities to support your dynamic blog. MySQL support is a must here.

Most web hosts understand that there is more to business that putting up a site. That’s why they are offering marketing packages to their customers. You should always try to take advantage of coupons and vouchers that are made available with your hosting plan. A few web hosts offer $50 vouchers for Google Adwords and YSM with their hosting services. Make sure you explore these offers before signing up for a hosting service.

At the end of the day, your hosting service can determine the success or failure of your blog. If you are stuck with a bad web host, your site could be down for hours each day (without you knowing it). Try to go for a web host that has a great reputation in the industry and not just a great marketing campaign. And remember, in most cases you get what you pay for.

In the part II of this series, I will specifically discuss the hosts that I have worked with and how you can find the right host for your blog. Stay tuned.