Hosting is a term used in the computer industry for a company that uses their servers and network connections to provide space for your website. In the old days, hosting was an expensive proposition because there wasn’t much competition and the alternative was to set up your own servers and high speed connection(s). Sometime in the 90s a whole bunch of people figured out that there were a few people making a ton on money running hosting companies. See the thing about hosting is that it’s almost all sunk cost. That is, once you set up the basic infrastructure it doesn’t matter whether you’re hosting 1 or 100 or 1,000 websites. So, once you’ve sold enough hosting accounts to cover your costs the rest is pure profit.

Once the price of hardware started to come down to the essentially free level (who’d have thought you could buy a brand new Dell for less than $500?), a lot of people jumped on the hosting bandwagon. Good news for you and me because that means prices come down. And come down they have. In the mid 90’s, I had a hosting account that provided 5Mb of space and 5 email addresses for 1 domain and was limited to some painfully small amount of bandwidth (traffic) after which I started paying by the megabyte. It cost $30 a month. Now there are a lot of companies that offer hosting for less than $10 a month that allow unlimited traffic, large amounts of disk space, and unlimited domains.

At any rate, with the prices being what they are, how can you afford not to have a website? For $120 a year you can add legitimacy to your micro, because on the Internet, with a well designed website, nobody can tell you’re operating out of your mom’s basement. Maybe the price isn’t the problem, maybe it’s that you feel like you aren’t technically capable. Most webhosting companies have addressed that with some sort of software that helps you build a website without ever mucking with any of the goring details. A lot of hosting companies use Site Studio ( demo here), a browser based website creation utility that lets you literally set up a website in a few minutes if you already know what you want to say.

OK, then, what if you’re the cheapest person on the planet and don’t want to pay somebody $10 a month to run your websites? Wouldn’t it be cheaper to get DSL or cable and set up my own server? Maybe even run my own hosting company? NO! Don’t Do It! I worked for a company in the 90s that thought it would be a good idea to jump on the hosting bandwagon. Then they could get other people to pay for their expensive T-1 connection. So they set up a totally inadequate former PC in a spare office and started selling web hosting to local businesses. What they didn’t realize was that running a hosting company is a lot of work. It has to be available 100% of the time. If a piece of hardware fails it has to be able to be switched out—-right now. The short form of the story is that it didn’t work out. If you’re working on internet based businesses, you should be able to expense your internet connection anyway. So cough up the extra dollars.

We’re going to get into this early because in most cases if you don’t have a website you don’t have a business. This isn’t always the case but you’re going to want to get one pretty quickly.

A domain is the thing you type into your browser window. For instance the domain name here is OrangeIsTheNewBlog.com. Others include  google.com, amazon.com and so on. The most common top level domains in the US are com, org, net and gov which used to stand for commercial, non-profit organizations, network infrastructure and government.  Without getting too specific your domain is your address on the Internet. A domain can affect people the same way a physical address affects how people feel about you and your business. For instance, it’s a well known fact that people are more likely to buy mail order from 123 Main St, Suite 27 than they are from PO Box 27. In the same way people are more likely to buy from a website with an address like www.amazon.com than they are something like www.obviously-a-webhost.com/stores/ mybusiness/ The first is easier to remember and more professional looking.

The great thing about the Internet is that addresses are all the same price… totally unlike 5th Avenue versus South Bronx. If you go to www.godaddy.com they’ll register any available dot com domain for about nine bucks a year. You can spend a lot more but you’ll get exactly the same thing regardless of the registrar (that’s the official title of companies engaged in registering domains) you go to. Godaddy offers other services like email and web hosting but I’ve never used any of those. I do use them exclusively for registrations though.

Regardless of who you use, it’s generally a pretty painless process. On most registrar’s home pages you’ll find a place right near the middle of the page for you to type in the domain name you want. It may take several tries to find one that’s available so it’s a good idea to have a selection of domain names already picked out.

The Internet has changed the way we can do business in two important ways especially for small and micro-businesses.

• It allows you to be open for business 24/7

• It allows micro-niches to be served

In some sense these are merely improvements over mail order but they allow you to do things that wouldn’t have been economically feasible pre-net.

The ability to be “open” all the time –like many things– can be both a blessing and a curse. You have to watch the amount of time you’re investing and you have to plan for “down-time” like vacations. In other words, what are you going to do when you want to take off for 2 weeks? You have to have a plan up front instead of coming up with something just before you leave if you are physically involved in order fulfillment or product delivery. Remember: the idea is to make a lot of money and have the time to spend it. A properly structured fulfillment system will alleviate many of these headaches.

The second way the Internet has changed things is that it allows micro-niches to be served that wouldn’t have been close to profitable in the pre-net days. Back then to reach a micro-niche you had to use mail order which meant printing a catalog, finding your customers and selling your product to them. The ‘Net isn’t magic, it’s just made the world a small place again. Now, on the web, you don’t have to print a catalog and you don’t have to pay somebody else to find your customers. That means you can bring your target market (the people you sell to) to a razor edge — ie. people who collect stuffed skunks.

One last note — conventional wisdom says that to make money on the web you have to cultivate customers (spend money) the same way you do with a brick and mortar — which is true if you’re running a small business on the web. If you’re running a micro-business on the web you only have to make enough profit to justify the time you’re putting in to it. I have one website that only makes about $50 a month profit. Not much, you say, but I only spend about 10 minutes a week on it. $50/0.66 hrs = $75/hour … good enough for me. And as near as I can tell this money will keep coming in forever.

Email has become a fact of life. Many people prefer it to the telephone. It allows you to maximize the use of your time and in today’s world that is a good thing. Personally, I think it’s over-rated for some kinds of conversations. Email is very good for conversations that are of the customer service type, ie. “Do you carry roses?” “Yes, we do.” Email would not be so good for conversations that require a lot of explanation such as the initial phase of a custom house design. After the plans had been more or less finalized email would again be a useful tool for communicating.

If you’re going to use email as a part of your business strategy – and you should – an AOL address is not going to provide the sort of professional appearance you want for your business. I recommend you register a domain and set up one or more email accounts using that. In the old days it was trickier to do something like that than it is now. Now it’s so easy there’s absolutely no reason for anybody not to have a personalized email address.

I’m not going to go into a bunch of detail about how email works. I’ll assume you already know that (if not there’s an excellent tutorial here.

I use GoDaddy because 1) they’re cheaper than just about anybody else and 2) I’ve never had a problem with them. Fortunately if you don’t want to set up a website at the very beginning (but I recommend you do as soon as possible) or yours is a micro-business that doesn’t require a website (I’m not sure what that might be) GoDaddy also has email hosting plans that are as little as $10 a year. So for about $20 a year you can trade in that AOL address in for an email address that’s every bit as professional sounding as ibm.com

I’ll have a post about email marketing in the coming weeks and I suggest you read that before you venture into that arena. Some people who are perfectly fine with pulling 20 pieces of junk mail out of their mailbox and tossing them in the trash become absolute crusaders when they get spam (an internet term for unsolicited commercial email). You can lose your email account, have your isp account cut off, and even in some instances go to jail for sending out spam. Know the territory.