However if you are like me and your target market is outside your own country then I was advised to host your website in the country it was intended for. e.g. My own site is Irish based but my target market lives in the USA therefore I host in the USA.

As for hosting companies I have found that some like to group their customers by country this means that even if you sign up for a service in a particular country you might find that you will end up on a server in Europe so be careful and get what you pay for.

The best way to find a host (and I made a few wrong choices) is to look at some other web sites and generally they will say where they are hosted on their home page or use the Whois lookup service.

Also see what support service are available, do they have contact numbers with 24hr support, do you have the option for live chat etc, ect.

Just make sure you fully check them out before you hit the sign up button and get recommendations from where you can.

About a year ago my life changed leaving me with some difficult decisions to make.

Because of my background in IT I decided to look at the possibility of starting a website nothing too complicated, because I am not a web designer.

This became a massive learning curve for me as we will find out going forward,
any way back to the beginning what to build. I looked at Business to Business websites and decided that I could help every business in Ireland out of the recession by enabling companies to self promote themselves and get exposure to other businesses that might require their services so I launched this web site called BizinBizout all was going well until I started to look at out how was I going to earn money from the website.

I thought companies are always looking to advertise on the internet so why not on my site. (I would find out why later on). Alongside the website we designed an E-Zine magazine which we could email out to subscribers.

As the Days and weeks went on we where finding it harder to find contributors, so we turned to linkedin, Twitter, and Facebook, this did not help either, so in a blink of an eye

I decided that BizinBizout was not going to work, I had given it a shot but no one was interested in my little idea.

What next “I need a product” I thought which means I will need an online shop.  And this is where the real journey begins……

Over the coming days and weeks I will try and plot my Journey from start to finish, on this site, reference where I got help and how good it was, discuss hosting, discuss web design, things I have found out along the way.

Follow if you want add advice if you like If you rant about a service using there name and it’s just not provable you will be blocked.

Each one was unique in its own way but one thing seemed to combine them all and you guessed it was “The Internet”. Each product or service needed to be promoted and nearly everybody chose the web.

The biggest problem of course with this is that Just because you build a website it does not mean that the world will know about you instantly and will start buying from you and you will make millions.

However their a lot of people who will try and tell you differently but this is not the case as we will find out as we go along.

Back to the story.. I thought long and hard about which products to sell on line and it appears that you can buy practically anything these days from Apples to Zebras (stuffed ones I hope),so  I chose a product that was close to home and easily available to try and keep shipping costs down but still offer high quality and well made products because the last thing you need is a lot of stuff coming back,  it costs you a fortune in the long run, not only do you loose customer confidence but you have to re-ship and refund and since the email revolution shipping cost’s are on the increase.

Now I have decided on the product I need a website.

If I had known at the beginning what I know now I would probably come up with a different name for my shop but as it turned out we got it very close to what I needed.

All the best domain names seem to have gone you cry, these tend to be the single names like www.car.com, or www.banananas.com, if you where going to sell banannas then this would possibly be one of the best domain names available because it has the name of your product in the title and you would be more likely to appear in a google search for that product. (so they reckon anyway).

Try and get a name that closely fits your product, service or image.  I read a book that I found very useful by David Viney, there are hundreds of them by different SEO experts it gave me a good overview of what I needed to do.

What I found since choosing my domain name is that sometimes it is better to go for a longer name so in other words if you where selling diamond rings then perhaps you would have a domain name like www.diamondgoldrings.com this is probably not a good example but the idea is to get a domain name that someone using a search engine like google or yahoo would search for.

I would like to point out here that I am not an SEO expert and probably never will be, I am just telling my story from my point of view.

One thing I did find very useful was the google keywords tool there is a mine of information there that will help you choose your name.

Once you have decided on a name you will need to host it.

next up is hosting….