New website

[shanshan]

Hi all,

I have read through many threads and found it all very useful.

We have decided to setup an online business solely selling to UK residents and based in London.

We are building our business from scratch, and thus will be selling 3 items to start with and intend to branch out.

I have read good reviews about EUKhost and will probaly sign up for the silver shared hosting package with Dedicated SSL for £76 per year. Is this suitable?

Since we will be based in the UK only, do we need a .co.uk domain name only? Where can we go to register our domain name? I have had a look and prices vary quite a bit. EUKhost charge £12 for 2 years for .co.uk. How important is having a good domain name?

We have designed out site using dreamweaver. How is the shopping cart function built in to it? Is this something we do before we sign up to a webhost?

In reference to payment gateways, we are looking at going with paypal and also Nochex or offer no start fees and a 2.9% transaction fee.

We also intend to setup a few other websites over the next few months.

What are the sequence of events? Given we have completed our webpages through dreamweaver, do we signup for a domain name, the webhost, then payment gateways then the webhost?

Can we like into SEO after we launch the website or should we look into it now?

Any other guidance would be very much appreciated.

Thanks in advance

Shan

[mrTibbs]

Hi Shan,
Find and register your wanted domain name. Any internet service provider offers this service, for a fee. £12 for 2 years is OK provided the domain is registered in your name and easily transferable if required.
For UK sales .co.uk has a possible marketing advantage. For international sales consider .com.
I just looked at the tutorials and on-line chat for eukhost .. they seem fairly comprehensive.
Their online chat support will take you through the steps required though their price list does suggest SSL is an add-on
A few further suggestions ..
Your site needs SEO attention before being posted. This can be a complex subject but 2 things to look for are relevance ( how close a match is your site to their search ) and authority ( expressed by who else is linking to you ). SEO is a huge subject, not least because the underlying search engines are getting more complex. Make the best site you can and the ranking will come. This from someone whose internet presence googles several times on page 1 with no SEO effort. [ This would be more impressive if my surname was SMITH. ]

[jimm]

Register1.net provide domain reg for just over half that price!
And 123-reg for even less (but offer poor support).

And id avoid eUK. There is a lot of talk about their business practices about the internet.
Such as using pictures of servers not destined for them, 50 staff but not charging VAT and acording to companies house they are a dormant company. The list goes on. There is never any real proof for wrong doing but there is no smoke without fire i would say.
Id recomend poping over to a hosting forum (forum2.co.uk for uk hosts) and lurking there to find some better quality hosting.

[mrTibbs]

They have real humans working on bank holiday Monday to answer sales calls: Humans who seem pretty knowledgeable. Thanks for the heads-up on possible future problems.

[mrTibbs]

The main issues I have managed to google for are dated back in 2003 and 2005. forum2.co.uk 'very beta' seach returned no results for eukhost.
I also saw a load of reviews which were saying good things from 2008 from affiliates4u and mixed review on hostratings.co.uk
I have a small e-commerce site I want hosted so will give them a try.