Domain registration for your blog

Once you decide to start your blog, as recommended in my earlier post describing about starting a new blog, you should go for a domain name rather than going for free blogs if you are looking to become a professional blogger or to create your own brand.

Selecting your domain name

Get a good name registered with .com tdl is very difficult. Domain names which are small, related to your blog topic and small (4-5 letters) is very difficult. Start searching for your decided domain name or other alternatives. While searching for domain name, you keep the following in mind

The domain name should be easy to remember

Should not have any symbol like -_ and also try to avoid numbers like kishore-asokan.com or kishore_asokan.com or kishoreasokan1.com. If you are not able to get the .com tdl you can go for your country tdl, like kishoreasokan.in. Hyphenated domain names have lots of disadvantages as its difficult to remember, but has some advantages in regard to search engine optimization as the word in your domain name can be the key search words in search.

Domain name should be your website name

Your domain name should be your website name - For example this website name is asokans.com and the url is also asokans.com. This will help you in branding your domain and popularising your domain. This makes the visitor to remember your domain name if they know the website name

Selecting your tdl (.com, .net, .org)

You need to select if your domain should be a .com, .org, net, or something related to your country. This depends on the website and topic of the website or your blog

You can find a good article related to selecting domain name at thesitewizard.com

Registration period

You need to decide, the registration period for your domain. If you have really decided to to for a long time blogging, register your domain for 5 years. Keep track of the expiry date of your domain and make sure that you renew it well before the due date. Usually you will be getting a reminder email for renewal, but the best,you keep track of all the domain expiry date that you have registered

Selecting your host

You need a good and reliable hosting company to host your blog. There are a number of hosting company who do give good service and support. I have my linux dedicated server at siteground and this blog is hosted at myhosting. I get the best support from them and they provide services like live chat which can be used to sort out issues instantly when your blog is having some problems related to server.

Selecting your hosting package

You can start-up with a basic package and upgrade to the needed one, when your traffic goes up and you need better bandwidth and other options. Now you can get basic packages less than $10 per month.

When looking into the packages, you should check if you are getting all the services that you need to run your blog, like the database backend, bandwidth, disk space, server configuration, decide if you need linux or windows hosting, etc.

Hope this post is helpful for you. I will be explaining the above with more information about these topics discussed, but I will be only working with wordpress as I use wordpress for all my blogs.