I have my own website.. my boy from e-trade hooked it up.

Compare a domain name to your house having a street address. The house is your website, and the street address is your domain name.

Domains can be purchased from many different places (domain registrars) but you’ll want to purchase it as cheaply as possible and use this domain registrar from here on out. If you build up a huge list of domains and they reside with several different registrars then you haven’t done yourself any favors. Renewals can be a pain and general yearly upkeep and any changes like DNS and CNAM can be a pain, so keep them all in one place.

I really can only recommend godaddy.com as the place to purchase your domain name. They have easy to use tools to manage your domain and offer the best prices on domain name on the internet.

Now if you only plan to build one website then many hosting plans offer you a “free” domain name with the purchase of a hosting plan. Trust me do NOT purchase a hosting plan with godaddy. GoDaddy has the worst hosting package around and the hardware, network and customer support sucks. Avoid them for hosting but feel free to use them as a great source of cheap domain registration.

Okay back to building that house (website) which your domain will point to (street address). It can be hard to determine who to purchase you webhosting from. Of course I use ixwebhosting for this blog and have been recommending them for years. Reliable service and excellent phone support 24 x 7. I’ll get emails regarding planned outages from time to time and they are always upgrading hardware, bandwidth or patching systems. Building up the infrastructure in this nature is paramount in keeping ME happy and all of my websites up and running fast.

Next you’ll need to publish your website with na easy to use content management system. WordPress.org is easy to install (ixwebhosting has a 1 click wordpress install button) and is super user friendly. My daughter has a wordpress blog and she is 7 years old. Check them out at WordPress.org

So let’s recap…

If you plan to buy multiple domains use godaddy. Building up a huge reservoir of domains is cheap and easy to manage with godaddy.

But if you’re building just one website, you can just get one free domain with just about any hosting package around. I use and recommend ixwebhosting to all my friends.

Last but not least you need to be able to easily publish webpages with a click of a button. Can you send an email? Then you can use wordpress.org!