Buy Your Internet Domain

If you intend to have a website, which you likely do, then obtain one or more domain names through Namecheap. The name(s) will likely be the same as your business name (see section 5 above) but may be more abbreviated to simplify it. If available, and inexpensive, we suggest you buy your company name domains for .com, .net, and .org. These are the most common dot suffixes and you may want to use them all in time, and to posses them in order to keep those names out of competitors’ hands. You will likely start with .com, may expand with .net for certain reasons, and may want to create a membership site with .org. However, the name you want may be a premium domain name, which can be very costly. In that case you can try using unusual spellings as we have done here with, “BizWercs.” The names “BizWorks” and “BizWerx” were already taken. I had used “allaboutbusiness.com” at one time, but that was too long!

a. We recommend that you visit www.namecheap.com to obtain your domain(s). They will provide you more options than sites like BlueHost, and you can also purchase cheap website hosting and complementary products there if you choose to. But, we only recommend you do so if their shared hosting will be sufficient for you and if you don’t intend to have a WordPress website (see section 15 below). Keep in mind that their WordPress hosting may be too slow for your site when it is built, and Google doesn’t like slow websites.

1) If you are going to use Namecheap for hosting for a WordPress website, then we recommend you use at least their “EZ WP Supersonic” plan. At the time of this writing, you get the first month free and the price is only $13.88 per month after that. This gives you a great deal for the price on a managed WordPress site, simplifies your business startup, and gives you time to test the speed before you even have to pay for the service. If it’s not up to par, then you can move your site to Pressable. It’s an easy migration! Of course, if you believe you are going to have to hire someone to build your website, they will likely recommend their own favorite hosting service.

2) You can also get web-based email through Namecheap and be using your own domain name for your email even before you build your site. This makes your email look more professional and it’s not expensive. It’s worth looking at! And, you can always change your email service later if you choose to.

b. For WordPress sites, we normally recommend using www.pressable.com for hosting. While they are not a registrar and require a separate hosting account, we believe it’s worth it. Build your site on Pressable and point to the Pressable DNS servers from Namecheap, and it works well. We moved a website from a very well-known provider to Pressable and it improved the speed substantially. We also plan to ultimately use Pressable for ourselves. It can be a little more expensive than Namecheap hosting (normally $25.00 per month for a the “Personal Plan” that we recommend for a single website, at the time of this writing, but it’s often on sale for less). They provide a site that is managed and optimized for WordPress and we believe is much faster than other non-optimized, shared hosting you get with Namecheap. And speed means a lot with respect to how websites load and how Google rates them for it. Want more customers? Speed matters!

c. Pressable versus Bluehost: Which is better? We certainly have an opinion on that! We investigated bluehost.com because it was recommended directly by WordPress.org. Bluehost also claims to be optimized for WordPress, to be fast, and offers shared hosting much cheaper than Pressable, offering shared hosting plans from $2.95 to $13.95 per month at the time of this writing. However, we tried to migrate three websites to Bluehost, and it was a nightmare! They make you pay the whole year up front for hosting, unlike Pressable which allows you to pay monthly. They will only allow one free website migration, but that didn’t work for us. While their website confirmed our website as compatible for migration, their migration plugin for WordPress errored out. So they wanted $149.00 to migrate the one site, which we did. Then they wanted another $149.00 to migrate our two other, different company websites—they will migrate up to five for that price provided they are all on the same account. Then, in migrating the first site, we lost our SSL certificate that we had with Pressable. No problem huh, Bluehost provides a free certificate. However, their certificate failed to install properly and they wanted us to upgrade to a $39.00 per year certificate to get our SSL back. This was after extensive time on the phone with their support people who didn’t seem to know what Bluehost advertised. They just wanted to sell upgrades to their products that didn’t work for us in the first place. I have never been short with a support person before, then came Bluehost support which aggravated the hell out of me.

We also noticed a number of concerning comments on the WordPress.org site about Bluehost. Accordingly, we do not recommend Bluehost. While their pages and advertisements look very appealing, we found them very difficult to work with and not worth the trouble. Not to mention that even after we did the migration, our site tested slower on Bluehost than it was on Pressable.