Before you go any further you need a domain name.

Choosing the right name can be extremely important if you are a commercial business and are wanting to attract visitors through the search engines organic (free) listings.

• In most instances, a good name would be in the form of a word or phrase that people are searching for, rather than the company name – eg floridacarsales.com not jbloggscars.com
• A Dot Com (.com) domain extension is by far the best to use if you are doing business worldwide, regardless of which country you are based in, or in the USA. If you live in a particular country, and will only be doing business in that country, then a domain name with that country’s extension should be used (eg .co.uk)

There are hundreds of companies where you can register your domain.

The one that I personally use and recommend is Namecheap.

Once your domain is registered you need to enter the DNS settings. What this does, in effect, is to let your domain registrars know the location of your website. These settings will be given to you by your Hosting company.

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Over the years I have used a number of Hosting Companies, before settling on the one I now consider the best, and as you may have guessed from the banner below, that company is Hostgator.

They seem to have all the requirements you will ever need (and more!), are competitively priced, and customer service and support are very good. And of course they use the standard CPanel, and therefore WordPress installation is completely automatic.

Go and have a look at their website and see a full list of features. One of the benefits of using Hostgator is that you are not tied to a contract. You can pay monthly, and cancel at any time. Alternatively you can pay for longer periods and get a discount on the monthly price. And if you use the above link and coupon code, you get the first month for 1 cent!

Hostgator – HIGHLY recommended for your hosting

Technorati Tags: cpanel, fantastico, hostgator, Hosting