Open Registration for the .CO Domain starts today. So if you missed out on getting your company’s name with a .COM extension, you may want to purchase the newly available .CO.

.CO was once the domain suffix reserved for businesses in the District of Columbia.  Columbia has decided to “cash in” on the .CO domain extension which is recognized worldwide as an abbreviation for Company, Corporation and Commerce.  This appears to be the first truly global and recognizable domain that the world has seen in years.

After the success of the .TV domain extension, which was once exclusively owned by the country Tuvalu, the Columbian government realized that they were sitting on a goldmine with their own country’s top-level domain.

The .CO domain was released in 3 stages:

1. April 26 through June 10: Eligible trademark holders were allowed to apply for the .CO domain names corresponding to their trademarks.
2. June 21 through July 13: Anyone interested in securing a domain name of high commercial value could apply before general availability begins.
3. July 20: General availability begins today, opening the .CO domain for registrations on a first-come, first-served basis around the world.

For the first year, only 9 registrars will be able to sell this domain.  It is expected that there will be many squatters hoping to snap up generic terms, shorter strings, and brand names then flip them for profit.

So if this is something you may be interested in, then don’t wait…
Purchase your .CO Domain Name today!

This can be a very simple decision if your company name is available: www.yourcompanyname.com

But what if it’s not available?  What do you do then?

If you are a start-up company, this should be part of the process when you are deciding on a company name.  Make sure the domain name is available and buy it now!  Don’t wait or it might not be available later.  If you are deciding between a few different company names, you may want to buy all of them until your decision is final.  At $10 per year, domains are cheap!  If the name you want is not available, then you may want to try variations on the company name until you find one with an available domain.

If you have an established business and your domain name is not available, you may need to get creative — but not too creative!  You want to choose a name that will be easy to spell and remember.  Always keep your customers in mind as you choose your domain name.  For example, most lawyers use their middle initial in their practice, but will clients searching for you remember your middle initial?  Most likely not. 

Play around with different options – many hosting companies will even make suggestions for you if the first domain you enter is not available.  Some options to consider are:

• Abbreviate your company name
• Add inc or llc to the domain name if applicable
• Separate words in the company name with dashes
• Choose a different extension, such a .NET instead of .COM

Another option to seriously consider is to use your keywords in the domain name.  If you sell widgets, then check to see if www.buywidgets.com is available.  The greatest benefit to this option is that your site will rank higher for the keywords that are found in your domain name.

Choosing you domain name is an important decision. Choose wisely.

The first 2 things you need to look at are disk space and bandwidth.

Disk Space: Disk space is cheap and most website hosting companies give you more space than you’ll ever need.

Bandwidth: Bandwidth is a little more complicated and most people ignore it because they don’t understand what it is.  Bandwidth is the number of bytes that get downloaded every time someone looks at one of your web pages.  If you exceed your monthly bandwidth limitation, some hosting companies shut down your website and others tack on additional fees for every extra megabyte that gets downloaded.  Either option is a bad one.

If you are running statistics on your website, you can use the following formula to roughly determine the bandwidth you will need for your website:

(Average Daily Visitors) x (Average Page Views) x (Average Page Size in kilobytes) x (31 days in a month) x (1.5 fudge factor)

The 1.5 fudge factor adjusts the amount by 50% for estimation errors.  If you are really unsure of your numbers, you could increase the fudge factor to be on the safe side.  You can also monitor your bandwidth each month and upgrade your hosting package if you see your numbers are getting to close for comfort.

Bottom line on bandwidth is that more is better, especially if you have a lot of photos on your website or if you expect a lot of web traffic.

Other factors to consider are email and software applications.

Email: Most hosting companies include email with their website hosting packages.  You may want to compare how much disk space each email account is allotted.  If you use Outlook or some other email client, you won’t need a very large mailbox because your email is downloaded to your hard drive.  However if you use webmail exclusively (so that all of your email and attachments are stored on the mail server,) you will want to purchase a pretty large mailbox.

Software: Does the hosting company supply all of the software that you need for your website?

• Content Management System (CMS)
• Blogging Software
• PHP or other programming language
• MySQL or other database

The software that is included with hosting varies greatly from hosting company to hosting company.  Your web developer can take a look at this for you to determine if the software provided meets all of your website requirements.

Add a comment below and let us know what you look for in a good hosting company.

What you want to look for in a Hosting Company

1. Great Customer Service

   If the company you are look at is not open 24/7/365 then pass onto the next company.  If it’s Friday evening at 5 p.m. and your website goes down, you do not want to have to wait until 9 a.m. on Monday morning to have someone take a look at it.

2. Reliability

   It’s amazing to me, but almost every hosting company claims to have 99.9% uptime.  How can that be?  Their website won’t tell you if their servers are unreliable.  The best way to find out how reliable a hosting company is is to Google them and see if their customers are complaining about them.

   • Are customers complaining that their websites go down a lot?
   • No email?
   • Other problems?

   A few complaints for a large company is to be expected.  A lot of complaints is a red flag.

3. Cost

   If you have a company that is reliable and has great customer service, then you don’t mind paying a little more for the peace of mind.  However, if you are paying $50/month or more for shared hosting, you are probably paying more than you need to.

Part II: Read on to find out what hosting features should be factored into your website hosting decision.