Having been involved in Affiliate marketing for while I haveseen a number of 'newbies' start out on their 'online adventure' payingfar too much for basic Internet facilities. Every now and then, I feelan overwhelming need to make a couple of important things known to thethousands who, every day, make their first step towards AffiliateMarketing or other Home Based Business.It seems, as with manythings in life, the new, uninitiated or young tend to give in toexcitement and their urge to 'get moving' by using or buying the firstfacility that comes along. A fatal and costly mistake, especially onthe Internet, where there are so many who are comfortable with sellingsomething for more than it is worth compared to other options available.
Tobegin with, you need an Internet presence to be online at all, so thefirst thing is a Domain name. Domains (the 'address' of your website -like a phone number) can be chosen by using one of the many facilitiesavailable to see if your choice is available (experience shows shorterdomain names are more 'user friendly' and more easily remembered,obviously).
To check the availability of a suitable domain name,go to: http://www.mydiscountdomains.com and select a domain name whichis available.
As a home based businessperson, it doesn't matter ifyou use the .com, .net, .biz or any of the other types of domains. Youjust can't use those like '.gov' that are reserved for specific typesof website (.gov is obviously for Government concerns and Departmentsetc). At this time, I recommend '.biz' as it still has the largestnumber of domain names available compared to '.com' or '.net'. A basicdomain should not cost more than $20, but can be as little as $8, soshop around.
Having done this, you need to get your domain ontoa Host Server. This basically means you have to have it 'installed'onto a public access server (not the same as your Internet ServiceProvider like AOL - ISP's just supply access to the Net - they don't'host' domains) so people can access it or 'dial' it up. You need a WebHosting company to do this and these offer a myriad of different plansand prices for all the different needs of the industry. As a Home BasedBusiness just starting out, you don't need a terrible lot of anythingto begin with, so the plan you choose should be quite reasonablypriced. As little as $3 per month will get you up and running easily,with all the features you're likely to need.
The firstconsideration is 'Disk space'. This is the same as the room on you PC'shard drive, in that it simply means the amount of space you will haveavailable on the server to put your website, with it's different pagesand images etc. To start with, you don't need any more than 100 - 200megabytes (each average web page takes about 20 - 40kb plus images,which are often used on many different pages, like your logo, 'headerimage' or navigation buttons).
The second consideration is'Bandwidth'. This is the amount of information (in the form of the webpages and images you build your website with) that the server will sendto people visiting your website. You see, each time a website isvisited, the person looking at it is actually downloading to theirbrowser (as opposed to 'downloading to disk') that is, they are beingsent all the information that makes up the web page being viewed. Thisall adds up to bandwidth and in a hosting plan it is referred to inGigabytes (1 Gb =1000 Mb) per month. Starting out, you will find 5 -10Gb per month absolutely plenty. You can generally update or increasethese limits easily and cheaply.
Other considerations regardingthe needs of your home business website are more complex and involvethings like how many email accounts you can have, as you will no longerneed to rely on your ISP email or free accounts with MSN or Yahoo etc.You will have your own domain and will have email addresses which youwill name, like 'me@mydomain.biz. This is far more impressive andprofessional than the 'dime a dozen' free email accounts that everyonehas.
Other facilities you may have or want available for yourhome based business website are Guestbooks, Forums, Databases, SSL(secure socket layer), Shopping Cart, FrontpageÒ Extensions (allowingyou to use the popular MicrosoftÒ website building and editing programFrontpageÒ). There are so many options, most of which you may notunderstand or need at all, ever, but some you will.
One specificoption which a home business website, especially Affiliate related,should have available is the ability to create FREE and eitherunlimited or numerous 'Sub-Domains'. This facility allows you to createmini websites (although they may not be so small) within you mainDomain. For instance, if your domain name is a 'generic' name likewww.online-plus.biz and you are marketing brooms, you can create aseparate website with a URL, which will look like thiswww.brooms.online-plus.biz . You can do this as many times as you areallowed sub-domains and it is extremely handy and cost saving forAffiliates and those who wish to 'diversify' but not have to get a newdomain for every product. This is why it is wise to choose a domainname which is 'generic', which means it has no specific meaning and canbe combined with anything and not look out of place. For instance, ifyou choose www.brooms.biz, then you can hardly use it in a websitewhich deals with Viagra!! (www.viagra.brooms.biz ??? ). Although, thereare some strange looking domain names out there??!!