Of course! A domain name is your website address. Where will you put that website? You need a web host for you to have a place for your website. A web host provides you a space (address) to place your website.

Virtual hosting is also known as shared hosting. This means that your site is hosted by one server and that server also hosts multiple sites. This type of hosting is good enough for websites that do not need much bandwidth. If you are new to web hosting virtual hosting has no effect on your site as it will still have its own IP address and you can run your website without interruption. This option is cheaper than dedicated hosting.

A good web host should be able to meet all your site’s requirements. It should have an excellent support for its customers on a 24/7 basis. A web hosting plan with less than 5 GB of bandwidth is not sufficient enough as it is common knowledge that the more bandwidth you have the more visitors your site can handle. Most web hosting companies now offer unlimited bandwidth, unlimited emails, unlimited hosting space and host unlimited domains. A lot of freebies are thrown it too for good measure – free shopping cart, free templates and free website builders.

There is no web hosting company that can guarantee 100% uptime. There is just no way of knowing if and when a server can go “off”. Even the best and biggest multi-million dollar sites have their shares of downtime due to unforeseen events. The next best thing that you can do is look for a web host that has an uptime guarantee and one that offers refunds for any downtime.

You can gauge the amount of data transfer you need by estimating the average page size of your website then multiplying it by the expected page views for that page in a month. If your website’s average page size is 50 KB and it has about 200 views a day, you will transfer about 300 Megabit of data a month. Therefore you need a plan that is over 300 Megabit of data transfer a month.

Yes there are but more often than not “unlimited” is not really unlimited for web hosting companies have in their policies that no client should abuse the system and use excessive amount of web hosting resources. Most web hosting companies adhere to a limited data transfer to ensure uptime for their clients and to uphold quality band width.

Subdomains are third level as domains are second level while the .com,.org, .net and more are first level. Subdomains are mostly used to build up the domain name but in a way its content separate and distinctive from the domain or main brand. For example www.weather.yahoo.com where weather is the subdomain, yahoo the domain and .com the gTLD.

Subdomain.domain.com is allowable by most web hosting sites. The feature is accessible through the client’s cPanel typically by a subdomain manager. Creation is quick and easy and you can promote the new subdomain at once. However, not all web hosting companies offer such plans.

You backup your laptop documents and files therefore it follows that there is a need to backup your website too. Hard disk on a web server can crash and when that happens your website could be gone. It is also possible for hackers to get into your site because of holes in the security.

A lot of web hosts offer automatic backups which could be on a weekly or monthly basis. These backups are saved on another hard disk. Other web hosts even have separate server and offsite location for their backups.

It is best to back up your data on a monthly basis. Using shell access, just tar the whole HTML directory and download it. You can also use an FTP program to download all files.

Most web hosting companies provide control panels for easy access on your hosting account. The control panel is sort of a dashboard where you gain access to control features of your hosting account such as emails, FTPs, SQL databases, password changes and parking and/or adding domains. More advanced features are backups, subdomains and website statistics.

Generally .com, .net and .org are open to all types of registrants and adhere to the first-come, first-served basis. There are however general rules of compliance when acquiring a domain name. The domain name should be used in good faith and in all ways legitimate. You must comply with trademark law and abide with the registration agreement you entered when you bought the domain name. Trademark owners in domains such as .biz and .name have the option to register their trademarks in advance. Meaning, you don’t have to build a website (yet) for your .biz and .name URLs.

Trademark is any word, symbol, device, name or combination thereof that is used or intended to be used in commerce and trade to set apart a product or services from one seller or manufacturer to another. Trademark is the brand name. There is a proliferation of registering domain names that have in parts or in whole trademarks of companies and individuals. These companies and individuals have spent money, time and effort to build up their trademarks. Once a trademark is diluted its brand will lose its “image” and credibility. This is the effect of cybersquatting, a growing internet concern.

In a nutshell, cybersquatting is the act of buying and registering domain names that partly or wholly contain trademark names and then selling the said domain names to the concerned companies or individuals. Cybersquatters ask for exorbitant fees. More often than not, the concerned trademark has no choice but buy the domain name as the cybersquatters use the domain name to say disparaging remarks about said company or individual trademark. Cybersquatting is not the buying or selling of generic domain names.

This will depend on the registrant. Most registrars have the registrants name and contact information available in WHOIS by default. However, if you buy your domain name through some sites, the site’s contact information and name will be the one that will show up in WHOIS. You also have the option for private domain registration on gTLDs or generic top level domains.

WHOIS is a database of information about domain name registrations and registrants in .com, . org, .edu, .net and cctld or country code top level domains. The following information are provided:

• domain name
• registrar
• whois server
• referral URL
• update date of registration
• creation date
• expiration date

The name, address and telephone number of the registrant may or may not be visible as the case may be. In most cases it is the registrar who keeps this vital information.

A registered domain name cannot be changed. If you spelled it incorrectly or had a change of heart regarding the domain name, there is nothing you can do about it. Most registrars have a 48- hour grace periods for you to cancel gTLD domain name registrations. Another alternative you can do is to register the correctly spelled domain name and forward the incorrect one to the new and correct URL. It is easier to just cancel the incorrectly spelled but you will gain more traffic as internet users will be directed to your site even if they typed the wrongly spelled URL.

Domain parking is about registering a domain name without your having to use it in terms of a website or even email services. Basically the domain name is registered and bought to reserve for future use and development and as protection against possible cybersquatting. This practice is popularly done by prominent people and celebrities. They register their names and variations thereof and then have them “parked” by registrars.

An IDN is a domain name that is made up local language characters. Simply put these are domain names that have diacritical marks used in most European URLs and/or characters from Chinese, Arabic and other non-Latin scripts. The IDNs make the domain name labels as displayed and viewed by the user different from what is transmitted to the DNS. The A-label is the one transmitted to the DNS. The U-label is the one displayed to the user as represented by IDN.

This type of domain names is registered just like the normal domain names. All you have to do is enter the domain name in the native language in the search bar. Select the preferred language from the drop down menu. However you should know that not all domains name extensions allow all languages and that not all characters are found in all languages too. Characters use should be in UTF-8

It depends. Most registrars have the domain redemption service where the original registrant of a domain name is given the chance to register the expired domain name. The redemption grace period (RGP) is generally set at 30 days. The 30-day RGP was set up to give registrants time to recover their expired domain names before it becomes available to the public again. This only applies to gTLD as ccTLDs recovery depends on the country.