Alright, let's talk about domain hosting the previous section was domain names. And the gist of that if you skipped it was make sure you control a domain name, register a domain name, I forgot to mention, by the way, domain registration tends to be a year at a time. But you can go multiple years ahead. I think I've got a domain that's registered until 2019. Because I really, really, really don't want to lose control of it. Or you can pay year to time, but really, don't forget if it becomes important to your business.

Domain hosting is essentially the technical job of running various services that are attached to that name. I'll talk about web and email to illustrate it. But then I want to drill down into some of the additional services that I think you want to look for, to help you influence that decision of or inform that decision of where do I host and or Where do I register? So let's use web as an example. When someone says, Hey, I want the web page from PDQ calm. You should remember from the last go round, that their machine actually looks up PDQ comm gets an internet address, and it goes to the machine on an internet address.

If it's a web request, it actually goes with a specific sort of sub address attached to it. It's called a port. So this little green machine is saying, Hey PDQ comm What have you got from me at Port? 80 PDQ comm is actually running the program web server that's sitting in waiting for those Port 80 requests that's sort of typical public port on and says, Well, whatever sitting in this PDQ comm directory is the web page that I'm actually going to send back to you. So request goes up on a designated sort of hard coded port can be changed. We'll leave that aside and PDQ knows to send it back You're paying the guys at PDQ comm hosting, to have that web server sitting there seven by 24.

Ready to dish up your website and send it back. Back in the Stone Age, some of us ran web servers under our desks, and then eventually in the closet, and then eventually in the server room. And now we don't do that anymore. running your own web server is a big, ginormous hassle. And I can't see why anybody at a company that's pretty darn good sized would would bother doing that. So instead, you've got a machine up that that's running websites for probably hundreds or maybe thousands of people and has very smart guys keeping it operating on emails a similar thing, but there's a little bit of a nuance difference that I think is worth your understanding.

If your buddy out here says hey, I want to send email to my friend at PDQ calm. He actually flips that email up to his email server will really do We'll drill into email and the nuances nuances of the Simple Mail Transport Protocol some other time, his server actually does the job of saying where is PDQ comms email? Aha, it's over here. So I'm going to take that email message that the guy wants to send. And I'm going to transport it over to the PDQ comm server. Meanwhile, you're sitting here talking to the PDQ comm mail server all the time, typically with either pop or I'm AP and pulling your mail down from there.

So that message here we'll do, we'll do poor guy animation, that message goes from this one up to his server, his server hands it off to your server and your server hands it off through your email box down to you. It's actually possible for there to be multiple hops and steps of mail server hands to mail server heading to mail server in between which how things tend to work. But you don't need to bother with that. Your email service is one of the things that your domain hosting company will typically provide. And there's a number of things that encourage you to look for specific features of the email service. Let's, let's drill into that and talk about it a little bit.

To find domain hosting is pretty darn easy. Pick your favorite search engine type domain hosting, whoever's willing to pay for ads on the search engine is in that business and wants you to look at them. And there's some very big companies that do it. I've been using these guys, we've been using these guys at media temple for years. We've been really, really, really happy with them. And I think they're a good one to look at.

I'm going to use them as the exemplar because the things that they've provided us have really helped us over the years. There's so My benchmark for web hosting, domain hosting web hosting for small business. I also like these guys that I met you a lot. They were a client of ours, they're extremely nice. If you're slightly bigger, give you a call. But I'm going to pause for a second and I'm going to tack on a section, I need to login to this and you don't want to get bored watching me do that.

Okay, we're back. And I'm all logged in, at media temple, which as I said, is the company where we get our domain hosting, domain hosting, web hosting, those tend to be used interchangeably. I already talked about web and email as two of the really common services for domain hosting. I want to drill into a couple of the others that I've found useful and even important over the years. I'm going to talk on email really briefly, I'll drill into this in more detail later on. Look for a domain hosting company that doesn't limit the number of email addresses you can use.

It's just a little bit silly to get charged for email addresses, all they are is extra little records, and pointers. So if someone says you only get five email addresses, frankly admin screaming out of the room and look for another domain host on, the other two things that I would look for in email service, specifically, is to make sure that they support pop Post Office Protocol access to your email. And these days, I wouldn't bother with a service that didn't alternatively or additionally provide I map which is Internet Mail Access Protocol. Those are two different ways for mail client to talk to your mail server. Could be the desktop client could be the client on your phone. Could be some other kind of client on I nap is considerably more sophisticated.

Lets multiple devices use the same use gmail account easily, which is becoming more and more common. So double check if it's pop mail only, which is kind of long in the tooth. That's not the most sophisticated hosting setup you could get. And it may kind of bite you further down the road. Let me go back to media temple and talk about some of the other essential services to keep an eye out for and talk about services and applications. And I know the boundary line can be a little bit fuzzy on the web site that's at an address takes up some space.

And the files that make up that website are sitting in storage and storage that you get with your hosting contract is actually kind of an asset as well. Our website for said visually is sitting in this storage here but we've got a couple hundred gigs of storage. And we can use that in a couple of other ways. There's a service that's very commonly attached, say word service again, File Transfer Protocol, or FTP, which has been around forever in a day. Why would I bother mentioning that? The example is this, we'll have clients that we need to transfer large video files to.

We could invest in another monthly service to deliver large files. But we don't necessarily have to do that. If we've got a couple hundred gigs of storage, and most of it is unused because your average website is not a game. We can upload the file to our storage on media temple and give our client and address an FTP address. You're used to an HTTP address, which is web hypertext transfer protocol FTP File Transfer Protocol actually precedes HTTP. It's a common way for someone to grab a single file or set of files from somewhere else on the net and download them.

So take a look at the amount of storage that your hosting company is going to allot. If they say, gee, you get a whole 10 megabytes of file storage for your website, see earlier note about run screaming from the room that's just not much in this day and age. And storage doesn't tend to actually cost them that much, because most people don't use all their storage. So I think you should be able to get usable space. You can use it for FTP, you could use it to store encrypted backups of something. I would not put unencrypted backups of material just willy nilly up on your file storage on the net.

But if you've got something important that's essentially locked up and you want an off site backup of it, that's one place to do it. You could rotate encrypted backups through on a monthly basis or something like that. broad scale better shot at some of the other services that you should look for on a domain host. If they're hosting your website, they probably have web analytics. What do I mean by that? Whenever a browser hits your website, the browsers told you stuff about itself, as you've been there before, what kind of computer is it on?

What size screen surprising amount of stuff, knowing that, and knowing that about a broad set of clients makes you smarter. So I would look for web analytics at your hosting company. It's kind of a mark of Do they really do web hosting? Well, there are other web analytics solutions that are not that are free. They don't cost you anything. Some of those are very good.

Some of those are alternatives to consider. But at a baseline at least, I would look and see if website visitor reports are part of the hosting package and I'd give them a checkmark Plus, we also get bandwidth usage reports. We don't touch a fraction of the bandwidth in our hosting contract. That's our particular site, our particular traffic. But again, that's something to look for. If you go over, it's not uncommon to have that be relatively expensive.

So being able to keep an eye on your web traffic should be something that is at your fingertips. The other thing is, this one's running very, very long. The other bit of advice I would give in terms of a hosting company, I would put in the word or the acronym lamp l a MP What does lamp stand for? lamp stands for? Linux, Apache MySQL PHP. What's that mean?

It's unfortunate. This should be upside down in a sense because Linux is the operating system or OS. Apache is a web server. MySQL is a database. And PHP is a very common, very useful programming language. The reason I recommend looking for a Linux host, a LAMP stack, LAMP stack host is this.

A lot of the really interesting software that's been created in the world now is being created as what's called Open Source, meaning the license to that software is typically free insists on being free. Linux is an open source. operating system. Apache is an open source, web server, ditto MySQL did PHP. Why does that matter to you? There are applications in addition services that sit on top of that LAMP stack.

And because those underlying components are open source and typically free, many of those applications and services that sit on that stack are also free. If you don't have that foundation of Linux, Apache MySQL PHP, on your web host, that may rule out a lot of the open source packages that could be very useful to your business. And I'm not talking about Mickey Mouse alternatives because you can't afford real software. some fantastic software coming in the open source world. Sometimes there's no commercial competitor for it. And I would not, I would not grab a hosting contract that wasn't lamp because of the amount of software that sits on top of that.

So let's see if I can wrap up and cap up. Domain hosting, web hosting Foundation, no brainer. Gotta have it. Email hosting, check and look for unlimited email addresses. You should get a generous amount of storage space with your web contract whether you use it or not, up to you some of the monitoring and logging who's visiting my site, how much bandwidth that I've used. Last but not least, I would definitely look for a lamp LMP Linux, Apache MySQL, PHP, a LAMP stack, hosting company, the the other kind of nuanced thing.

But if you get a chance to kick the tires and nuance worth looking for is how easy is it to use through a browser. You'll notice that I'm jumping in and out of stuff on media temple just through a web browser. I don't have to have any other software to control and administer the site or the sites running on this domain hosting arrangement fantastically. easy to use. There are more sophisticated ones for more sophisticated users. Frankly, I don't have the time or patience to deal with that.

And we don't have a full time IT guy. So this hits a really sweet level for me. If I need to add an email account, I go in in a browser and add the email account. And I'm done. If I want to get to my email through webmail client, there's actually one built in. So you want a web based control panel.

And if you can kick the tires and see how easy you find it to use that control panel, it's absolutely worth doing. Last but not least, if you do take a look at media temple, there's your 10% off coupon courtesy of me. So that's domain hosting in kind of a nutshell, take a look at your domain hosting needs. And here's my last bit of advice. strongly consider registering your domain name at the place you do your domain hosting. It's possible to do those two things separate.

It's possible to register domain here and host all the services over here. But the longer you go, the more successful you are, the more of a pain that will turn into. And it's just not a decision that makes sense. The cost differential of a few bucks between lower cost registrar and hosting company that has what you need is not a cost that will actually pencil out in your own time and frustration and the brittleness of the system eventually, I know it's sort of putting all your eggs in that domain hostess basket. But if you host with a credible company, that is not going to be the problem that keeps you up at night. So parting bit of advice, domain red domain hosting at the same place To be continued.