• Shared Hosting - This is recommended starting point for most websites. With a shared hosting plan, your site shares a server with a number of other sites. By far cheapest way to get a site started, shared hosting is ideal for low-volume, low-bandwidth sites. Pricing for these types of plans can be anywhere from about $5 to $30 per month. You have zero involvement in maintaining server or it’s software. All you have to worry about is your website. The negatives about Shared Hosting are that you are limited in bandwidth, and you are potentially affected by other web sites on server. If one of other sites on server suddenly received a lot of traffic, your site’s performance will be affected. It should be noted, however, that this is rarely a problem for most hosts.
• Dedicated Web Server – Once your site starts getting a significant volume of traffic (i.e. more than 3,000 unique visitors per day), you may want to think about moving up to a Dedicated Web Server. This is where your site is only site on server. The benefits of this sort of server are that you can generally specify what software is loaded onto machine, you have access to 100% of it’s capacity and bandwidth, and you are not affected by other sites on server. On negative side, you will pay much more for this sort of service. Depending on capabilities of machine and software that is loaded on it, you can easily spend well over $100 per month.
• Rack Space – Leasing rack space provides web site owners with maximum level of flexibility and security by allowing site owners to purchase whatever hardware and software is appropriate. On other hand, you are responsible for purchasing, installing and maintaining your own server. If your server goes down in middle of night, hosting staff will generally reboot machine for you (for a fee), but you will be responsible for making sure everything is working correctly. Web servers can easily cost $10,000 for hardware and software, plus you will have additional fees from your hosting company for bandwidth and other services. This sort of option makes most sense for companies getting thousands of hits per day, or for those that require highly specialized server-side applications that must be custom configured.
• On-Site Hosting – By far most expensive option, on-site hosting requires that you are very familiar with maintaining web servers and are available to fix problems 24 hours per day and 365 days per year. With this option, you are your own hosting company, and you pay not only for server(s), software, and technical support, but also for T1 lines, DNS services and other complex issues that are generally out of reach for small start-up businesses. The most compelling reason to host your own website is for security reasons. Sites such as transaction processing companies, online banks, or other online services that need to be able to audit their security measures for one reason or another generally choose this option.

Some web-hosting companies will handle mapping your domain name to their servers, while others will instruct you on how to do it yourself.

In conclusion, you can get a website up and running for as little as $60 per year. The more bandwidth (website traffic) you require, more you are going to pay. You will also pay more for higher levels of service, support, and software. You should make sure your web host supports your development software and any server technologies you are using. In addition, highly specialized sites, sites with large amounts of traffic, and those required to maintain certain security standards may warrant dedicated servers that cost more than shared hosting plans.

In addition to recently expired domains, you can also do searches on major registration sites such as:

• www.register.com
• www.buydomains.com
• www.godaddy.com

• www.domainsbot.com
• www.stuckdomains.com
• www.expireddomainspy.com

A few considerations when picking a domain name:

• Make it descriptive – Visitors should be able to tell what your site is about by looking at your domain name
• Keep It Short and Simple – Yes “KISS” theory applies to domain names. Remember, your domain name will also be your email address. Your email address needs to be simple enough that you can easily give it over phone to a prospect without having to repeat yourself multiple times.
• Don’t use special characters and modifiers – This means hyphens, “-”, underscores, “_”, or modifiers like “inc” or “biz” etc. It is next to impossible to explain to someone over phone why your domain has a hyphen in it. Leader companies don’t have such things.
• If at all possible your domain should be: www.yourcompanyname.com. If that domain is not available, you should consider changing name of company to a domain that is available. It’s that important.
• Pick a top level domain for your geographical area (i.e. .com, .co.uk, .hk). Feel free to also purchase .net, .org, .tv and others, but you should make sure you get .com.

In conclusion, registering a domain is an easy process that can be difficult to execute properly. Your domain name should be descriptive of site you are building, and it should also be simple to remember. You should make sure to have a top-level domain such as .com or .co.uk. Finally, purchasing a recently expired domain that is pertinant to your industry may be beneficial in that you may be purchasing a domain that is already recognized by major search engines.