Domains + Hosting

CHAPTER FIVE

Domains + Hosting

The Basics

Many of you at this moment do not know what a domain or hosting is. I didn’t either when I first got started!

A domain is just the website address…the thing you type into the web browser that looks like www.website.com.

Hosting is where your website files are stored. Domains and hosting are two major pieces to the puzzle that make your website work. You need a place to store your website information like picture files, articles, and code that makes your website work properly.

But people need to know where to find those files, and that’s why we get a web address (domain) for it too.

Both domains and hosting are going to cost money, and there’s no way around it.

But to run an affiliate marketing business, these are the only two essentials, and they are considerably cheaper than any other type of offline business.

A .com domain name will cost you $11/year, up to $20/year with privacy protection from some domain registrars.

For a very basic hosting plan you’ll pay between $5 and $20/month. Some places require you to pay for a year in advance, and others let you pay monthly.

I will make some recommendations in this section, but there really are many places to choose from.

Brand Names VS EMDs

When picking your website name there are two major schools of thinking. Both have advantages and disadvantages.

EMD means Exact Match Domain, and it basically means that you choose a domain name based on a keyword you find (see chapter 7). 

This would of course be a high traffic keyword. The idea is that by using this keyword as your domain name, you have a good chance of ranking for it and getting loads of traffic as a result.

If you can pull it off, great. More power to you!

The trouble is that this idea has been around for many years, and most of the good ones have been scooped up by domain hoarders who want to sell them at a premium, sometimes for thousands of dollars!

The are of course little gems out there, and as new products are invented, new, previously low traffic domain names suddenly become in-demand.

But in general, if you can think of it off the top of your head, it’s probably already taken.

I remember when I was buying domain names and wanted to buy beeer.com (yes, 3 e’s), I was shocked to see that it was already bought and squatted on.

What was more shocking that up to 5 e’s was already taken!

Someone actually bought beeeeeeer.com!

Ok, bad example. It’s a very low traffic keyword. But you can see that to find an EMD that really will help your traffic is going to take some work. If you think you are clever, there are probably 5 other clever people in the world that have already thought of your domain name, especially if it’s based off of traffic stats you find using a keyword tool.

On the other hand, choosing a brand simply means that you pick a catch phrase or name that is unique to your website. You can use your name, or a mascot, or, my favorite, create a keyword rich brand. “Keyword rich” just means that you include some kind of niche-relevant keyword in your domain.

Marketingwithmarie.com or learntotypewithmike.com would be good examples of using your name for branding. Learntotype.com and marketing.com are definitely already taken, so just tweak them and make then specific to you by adding your name. You still get a high traffic keyword in the domain, but add the unique brand of yourself to the mix.

Maxyourtaxrefundmaniac.com or videoeditingsoftwarez.com would be two examples of keyword rich, branded domains. Since maxyourtaxrefund.com and videoeditingsoftware.com are either established websites or owned by domain squatters, we need to get creative if we want to use those keywords in our domain name. All you need to do is add a word or a letter and and tada! You now have a unique brand with a high traffic, highly descriptive phrase in it.

Domain Extensions

A typical domain extension is going to be .com, .org, or .net. There are a huge variety of domains extensions available nowadays, including .biz, .io, .guru, and even .cool or .website. You can actually register your own domain extensions to be whatever you want if you have enough money.

But think back to your recent searches and think about how many of them were non-dot-com domains? Very, very few. This is the big reason I always try to get a .com domain name, even if it means giving up a website name that I really want.

I have seen some case studies that consistently ranked .com, .org, and .net as the most effective domain extensions for ranking, in that order. I highly recommend you just go for a .com since it will help you rank easier than the others.

Why are the other ones available if they are just plain useless? It might just be an attempt from registrars to make more money, since they clearly don’t really care about what Google’s doing and how search engines actually rank the domains they sell. Maybe search engines will start to rank other extensions more equally in the future, but for now, .com what reigns supreme.

Also, keep in mind, that some websites just don’t care about search, and are running mainly offline businesses. They want a catchy name,

so mybusiness.website is pretty easy to remember. Some online companies may do other forms of traffic generation like social media, in which case search engines results are not very important to them.

Other extensions to consider would be local ones, like .ca (Canada), .co.uk (UK), .au (Australia), etc. These are viable options if you only plan on targeting a specific region of the world with your website. For example, if you are building a website for a local business in the UK, or promoting Amazon products specific for folks living in Australia, then a local extension would be fine.

The advantage is that you gain authority for your local market. Australian domains are going to reach an Australian market more easily, and won’t have any problems outranking .coms. In fact, Australians might be more likely to click the .au because they know it applies to them! You become super focused on this market, and are able to market your website to them more effectively.

The downside is that you will struggle to rank anywhere outside of the country, meaning you give up most of the world market.

The analogy I always use is you need to decide if you want a small piece of a large pie or a large piece of a small pie. Most people will be better off just picking the .com because you can still target local markets with individual pages on your site.

Breaking Away From Old Standards

High PR, aged, & bad grammar domain names are three things I’d like to call attention to and steer you away from. Some people scour the internet looking for ‘aged domain names’ like they were a fine wine or French cheese. An aged domain name just means that it was an established website for some years already, or has been registered for a long period of time.

However, these domains come with a lot of baggage, and aren’t necessarily “more powerful” than a fresh domain. Would you rather spend $1000 on a domain that might rank well but might also have ton of links from irrelevant sources pointing to it or $10 on a brand new site that you know has not been meddled with?

True, you can do research and flush out some older domains with good link profiles that may get your business off to a quick start. But it won’t guarantee the success of your business, and learning to do that stuff at this point adds a whole extra level of complexity, cost, and time to getting started. Skip it for now and come back to it later if it interests you.

The same thing goes for high PR (Page Rank) domains. Google doesn’t even use Page Rank as a ranking metric anymore, so it’s not worth discussing. In the past Page Rank was a method that search engines used to determine which websites had more authority than others. It’s obsolete in Google, though Bing might still be using something like it, as they tend to be behind the times by a few years.

The other thing I advise you to avoid is using bad grammar keywords in your domain just because you found good traffic stats in your keyword tool. People type all kinds of gibberish into search engines because they know it’s a machine, or autocorrect is messing them up.

Consider this: Google autocorrects mistakes and makes guesses based on natural language.

If someone searches for “lawnmower carburetor no gas”, they are probably most interested in results related to how to fix the mower and get gas to it. Buying the domain lawnmowercarbretornogas.com doesn’t guarantee you’ll rank for the term, and doesn’t guarantee that people will click on and like your site, and to be honest, it just looks kind of tacky.

People are much more likely to click on howtofixyourmower.com

or mrcarburetor.com rather than something that looks poor English.

Plus, it just looks unprofessional, and you may be using this domain for decades.

Do you really want your business for the next few years to be

cooliphoncases.com? Not me.

Shared Hosting VS VPS

There isn’t a whole lot to discuss here, but it’s worth explaining briefly. The vast majority of new website owners are going to start out on shared hosting. This basically means that you are using the same “space” as other website owners.

You have your own private logins and whatnot, but it’s like living in a dorm, where you have your own room but everyone is in the same apartment.

It’s cheaper, but it’s generally slower and makes you more dependent

on the actions of others using the same server. One guy draining the server’s resources could affect your site negatively.

VPS is going to be way too much power and too many features for someone running one site, which also happens to be their first website. That being said, as you grow your business it’s something you should seriously consider moving to. You get a server “space”, which only you occupy, and you can do with it as you please. Moving will be super simple when the time comes (most hosts will

do it for you), so I would just pick a shared hosting plan at this point.

Having a VPS can give you various management options for your websites which I won’t explain because I’m not 100% clear on all the features and they aren’t necessary to running your affiliate business.

For a basic VPS package , it’s really not that expensive, but it is more expensive than shared hosting. A shared hosting account, even for hosting multiple websites, will cost about $8-$20/month, while a VPS package, depending on the amount of bandwidth and other features included, will cost $40- $100/month.

I started out on shared hosting, and now host websites in a variety of places, mainly on my VPS.

Hosting Recommendations

There are tons of choices for where to host your website. However, I wanted to share some personal experiences with you to help you avoid headache down the road.

When I got started, I hosted at the cheapest place possible – Fatcow. I later realized that their first year discount was not continued to the second year, which made them much less appealing. I also had multiple issues dealing with websites going down, maintenance problems, and inadequate customer support.

I then switched to Hostgator, and was happy for a while, but then had two years of nothing but nightmares with this service. For being one of the biggest players in the industry, they really provide a horrible service. I really don’t want to go on a rant here, but I will list the most egregious events that turned me off of their service.

1. Several “total blackout” events within 1 year

2. Monthly downtimes of 1 hour or more for my websites

3. Frequent Wordpress loading errors

4. Customer service telling me that upgrading will solve the problem

I contacted them about, only to find out later that the problem was unrelated to my previous hosting package and still a mystery

5. Live chat and phone blackouts making support unreachable for weeks at a time

6. Week-long wait times on ticket support (sometimes)

7. 90 day wait for my refund (when I finally moved). 

Now, I host the majority of my websites at a place called KnownHost. I have only hosted there for about two months now, but I haven’t had a single issue with websites being down, and although they don’t have live chat, their ticket support usually answers within 30 minutes or less.

They are also a lot cheaper. I was paying $100/month for Level 4 VPS at Hostgator, and for a similar setup, am now paying $40/month at KnownHost.

However, I am hosting onemorecupof-coffee.com at WebSynthesis now, which has been nothing short of amazing. I’ve noticed faster load times, they include things like Securi Security Monitoring, and have other technical stuff related to Wordpress specific hosting.

The price will scare most people off. I pay about $40/month for hosting just one website. For me, it makes sense. My website works better, and the money I’m making from the site functioning better makes it worthwhile. With the profit I’m pulling in from that site, every hour that it’s down, I’m losing money. So yeah, I’ll pay $1.50/day to have a web hosting service that actually cares about my business.

Chapter 5 Summary + Tasks

Now we know the basics of how our business is going to be set up. We will store our website files at a host of our choice, and we need to buy a domain name that reflects the topic of our business.

To get your website live, there are three basic steps.

1. Purchase a hosting package, make note of what your DNS (nameservers) are called

2. Purchase a domain name* and point your nameservers to your hosting (from above)

3. In your host, follow the steps they provide to build a blank

Wordpress website

*domain names can be purchased at hosting company or domain registrar.

Namecheap is great for cheap prices. Godaddy is great for extra customer service, including phone support.

How these steps are executed vary from place to place. Rather than pick just one configuration and show you how to do it, I’ll let you make the decision of which companies you want to work with and contact their support centers individually for guidance. Just keep those three steps in mind, and you’ll be fine.

Tasks For This Chapter

1. Purchase a hosting package

2. Purchase a domain

3. Point domain nameservers to your hosting

4. Build a blank Wordpress website inside your host

NOTE: This part is probably pretty scary for some folks that have never build a website before. Keep in mind that we do not need to have 100% oversight of our website structure at this point. Our #1 goal right now is to get a “shell” Wordpress website built on our host and live so we can log in and start building.

Beyond that, don’t worry about it! If you are worried though, you can also choose to read the rest of this book first to see what the endgame is.

ATTN! Please read the last chapter to find out how to get free web hosting designed specifically for Wordpress.