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Quite often people ask us to setup their website or bring their business over internet without having the fundamentals of having one. We always advise customers before you even choose a name for your business have a chat with us. The name you choose for your business can make or break your business.

There are 3 main parts to have a website:

• Choosing a “Domain”: yourcompany.com is called a domain. This is extremely important as it should represent your business function. For example, if you are going to sell “leather shoes”, you should not choose a very long name such as “LeathershoesmadeinUK.com” or “UKleathershoes.com” as these names are too long or may not be available and have been taken by others. Names such as “LS” are also no good because it means nothing and when people search the internet for “Leather Shoes” they will not be offered “LS”.

Therefore, before you make a choice of name for business and open a bank account for it, make sure the name you want for your business has something similar available in internet. As a general rule, name should be not too short and not too long and make sense to people and be a searchable name. This will help your business or website name to come up in searches far better. You can use the search facility we have on this site to find the right name for your business. https://www.globalhostcentre.com/domains

• Choosing a hosting “Platform”: What do we mean by platform? Platform refers to the operating system running on a server / computer that is connected to internet 24/7 at a very high internet speed. You will have to have an account on that server which will give you some space to house your website and emails. You can’t have your website running in your home computer, it just doesn’t work for many technical reasons.

Now going back to “Platform” issue, you can have a server with operating system Microsoft Windows or Linux (not both). The confusion comes here as which one to choose?! First answer the question of what kind of website you will have? Each platform is suitable for a particular purpose.

Some websites use Microsoft technology called .NET to build web applications. .NET provides a powerful toolset and feature-packed to build web apps, desktop and mobile apps, gaming and IoT solutions. .NET is scalable, easy to use, with lots of functionality and high security, consistent APIs, which means using the same code, the site will work everywhere on every device just the same. >NET can only exist and be run on Windows server. So, if you want to build an advanced web application, you do need a web server with Windows platform.

On the other hand, many E-commerce websites, blogs, CMS (Content Management Solutions), Social media websites such as Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia, Slack all been created using PHP language. PHP is a kind of scripting language. PHP runs best on a server with operating system Linux. There are lots of pre-configured PHP written packages that also run better on Linux, such as WordPress, Joomla, Magento and Drupal. These packages are “Open Source” which means you don’t pay for them, but you will have to pay for additional features should you need them.

• Choosing a web developer

So now, you need to speak with your web designer and tell him what you want. They will be able to advise you what platform to go for. The beauty of our hosting system is that we have special measures in place on our Windows platform which also enables you to run PHP driven websites.

The easiest way is to speak to ourselves, we can help you with choosing  the right domain, the right platform and can help you with your web design as well.