If you have started a new business, or need to start hosting for your small business website, you may be feeling overwhelmed with what to do and the options available.
You will need to get the following for your hosting setup, a domain name, a DNS account, web hosting and email hosting. All four will allow you to successfully get your website and email running and ensure a smooth start. Note that I have used every service I recommend, minus one or two but have done enough research that I can safely say to use their services.
Domain Name
The first thing you obviously need is a domain name for your business website. If you haven’t already got a domain name, or if you want to transfer to another registrar because you are paying too much, these are the three I recommend below:
namecheap.com – a fairly inexpensive place to buy your .com and has good customer service in my experience.
namesilo.com – use to be the cheapest place to buy a .com – I haven’t had to use their customer service yet.
porkbun.com – currently they are considered the cheapest place to buy a .com domain. I have yet to use this, but have heard good things about their service.
As you will quickly see, I am recommending a different service for each component of your website and email, you will notice though most services I have listed here will provide all the other services. But I strongly recommend you separate all these services, mainly because you will not have one point of failure if one of these services is down or closes down. And it makes it easier to switch services if you are not happy with them or their prices have gone up.
DNS Service
You can skip this service if after reading this, makes you too nervous. I use a DNS Service for most of my client website setups. This allows me to mange the various DNS settings on the domain name so I can point my website to one place and my emails to another place. This is in basic terms what a DNS service will do you for.
The only one I recommend is cloudflare.com (link sends you to their information page explaining what a DNS is). This is a free service to use to do exactly what I described above – I use the nameservers at cloudflare.com and then point my website and emails to the services I use. I’ll be doing a separate article explaining a bit more what I do and why I do it.
Web Hosting
This is probably what you have been really waiting for, I get this question asked a lot.
The only hosting services I recommend for regular shared hosting is hawkhost.com and knownhost.com. These two are the ones I use the most for any clients or smaller sites I just need to setup and not worry about the bank end.
Both use cpanel for the hosting management and come with regular backups (you should always create a manual back of your website just to be sure). Their pricing is reasonable, between $5 to $10/mo and they don’t jack up the prices after the first year like some other hosting companies.
I’ve used them both for many years and have no complaints.
If you are a little bit of a techie or want to play around a bit, I would recommend using a VPS service like digitalocean.com or linode.com. These are two services that provide a great vps server and have a nice client front end to help set you up.
Email Hosting
You may be wondering why you need a separate email services when most hosting companies, like hawkhost and knownhost already provide an email service in their costs. Unfortunately, using your web hosting provider for emails can lead to emails being bounced and blocked by your clients and customers.
This is due to a number of factors, but the biggest issue when you are using a web hosting account, you are not the only one website/domain on that server. If there are any domains being used for spam, the entire server or IP range will get blocked by email providers such as Gmail and Outlook and it is difficult to get it fixed.
As a result, it is usually easiest to use Google or Microsoft for your email, both are relatively affordable and may be a bit complicated to setup and best to hire someone who can do this for you as a one time fee. After that, it really does work very well and no real need for ongoing support (unless you have hundreds of email accounts that need to be managed).
Once you have these services setup, your business website and email will be running well and easily managed for years to come.