How to Buy your perfect name & finding someone to host your WordPress Website

Step 2: You are going to need a domain!

To give it a name, we need to purchase a domain name, this is the url that you and your users type in to find the website, for example www.setupawebsite.co.uk. Remember what you are trying to solve for example we are helping people to answer ‘How to setup a WordPress website’ and so our domain was a perfect fit! Find your perfect domain at IONOS. Already have a domain & hosting? go to step 3!

Ideally, this should be something short, memorable & one to three words long. This helps to make sure that it’s easy for people to remember and they can easily find it if they hear about the website through word of mouth or advertising.

We also need a company to store the website for us and make it accessible to others online, this is called ‘hosting’ and having a speedy hosting set up is essential for getting users to the site and converting users.

Whilst using WordPress and its plugins/themes is completely free; having somewhere to host it and a domain name does with a monthly/yearly cost, however you pick both of these up from as little as £5/month, where as a digital agency could charge you that for answering an email!

Where do I buy a domain name and hosting?

Throughout my personal development career, I have tended to use Krystal for my hosting and domain names. Krystal are a UK based, highly rated company that offer a number of hosting packages that range from being cost effective to enterprise level hosting.

When purchasing hosting from Krystal, they also give you the option to buy a domain name as you are setting up your web hosting package. This keeps everyone under one roof as it where, and keeps it simple.

If you prefer a larger more well known hosting provider you can use IONOS, which offer great deals with fantastic customer support. Find out more about their services here.

It also reduces the amount of setup required by yourself as it will all be done automatically through the set up process, and means you don’t need to worry about DNS records.

Ofcourse, if you already own a domain and are wanting to transfer it over they support this and provide plenty of information and guides on how to do that, you can also view our guide once it’s finished.

Which hosting package do I need? WordPress Specific?

Krystal offer a number of hosting packages that vary for the users needs, I will quickly try and describe what each of them and why you might need them.

Web hosting

Web hosting is the most basic package that is offered. This tends to be for individual bloggers or very basic brochure style websites that aren’t going to be coming under a great deal of traffic.

WordPress hosting

This is hosting that is tailored specifically to WordPress sites. This means they can offer one-click installations of WordPress with hosting that is specifically optimised for WordPress and its functionality. I would recommend using the ‘Onyx’ WordPress hosting package as this will cover the majority of your needs.

Cloud hosting

This is very fast hosting that is created to allow users to create a cloud based solution. This is more for advanced users that want more flexibility with their hosting package, and for large companies with a lot of traffic.

Enterprise hosting

Again, this is for larger companies with tens of thousands of daily hits on the website and are looking to buy fast & a more customised hosting package. For smaller businesses, the Onyx WordPress Hosting Package should be more than enough.

I would recommend you purchase the Onyx WordPress plan, this will cost you around £20 per month and should future proof your website until you are hitting upwards of 20,000 users per month.

Alternatively for brand new websites, I would recommend you look at purchasing the Ruby/Sapphire Web Hosting plan. This offers a good quality hosting package with a reduced cost for lower risk for companies that are maybe starting up, this starts from £10 a month.

If you are looking at how to setup a WordPress Website, then it’s fair to assume you might not be super confident with making website so this low cost – low risk option is ideal.

What domain name shall I pick?

When you are looking to buy a domain name the url is very important and it should reflect what your site is going to be about. Don’t try to over complicate things by adding extra words, hyphens and numbers, remember someone has got to remember this to directly find you online!

Depending on the type of website you are wanting to create should effect what you call your website. For example if your company name is Wood’s Plumbing, then trying to find a site called woodsplumbing.com would be ideal. It’s short, snappy and easy to remember and if you are speaking to clients there’s no confusion on what’s punctuation and what could be numbers.

Alternatively, if you are setting up a personal blog or a personal shop then something containing your name would work perfectly well.

.com/.co.uk/.shop?

It used to be the case that every website was website.com or website.co.uk and that was the way it was. Nowadays, theres a domain extension for just about anything and there’s no real penalty for using them! There are many shops that have .shop at the end of their domains and theres many more extensions that can be used such as .app, .agency & .net!

It’s worth noting that a number of domain extensions are restricted and cannot be purchased such as charities (.org.uk), government sites (.gov), educational (.ac.uk) and a number of others so do your research on what works best for you.

If you were making a website that is UK based and your user base would be searching ‘How to setup a website UK’, then a .UK domain might better for you to ensure users know your website is UK based.

Whilst there is not penalty for using these, bare in mind that again, people need to be able to find your website. Because of how websites used to be it’s possible that people will always default back to putting .com or .co.uk so if a website with this domain already exists then customers may accidentally find that instead. So if you can get .com or .co.uk, then I would recommend you do so!

Domain Tips

As a general rule of thumb, you know your target market the best, so go with whatever you think sounds catchy and you like it. It should also describe your line or work and the sites purpose in a couple of words.

If you are struggling to think of a name there are a couple of websites that can help you!