For those of you who are looking to set up a new website, there are several services I can highly recommend, mainly due to the fact I use them myself and have done for several year now.

Domain Names

The first thing you need to think about when setting up a website is your domain name - the URL you type in to your browser address bar to find the website, e.g. simonjobling.com.

When buying your domain, you won’t find a much better service than from GoDaddy. Use the form below to search for your domain right now.

Search GoDaddy

.com .co.uk .us .net .org .biz .info .ws

Hosting

Once you have your domain name, you could do with somewhere to host your website. Many ISPs offer free webspace but its almost impossible to get your domain name to point to that space properly (there are usually domain forwarding services but this doesn’t look very professional and will affect your search engine ranking).

This website is hosted on Dreamhost - a hosting company that has been running since the mid-90s and receives great publicity from among the Web development crowd. The beauty with Dreamhost is the fact you can host as many websites as you like, and all for the same price. I have most my client websites on the same hosting account and have rarely had a problem.

If you’re not too keen on Dreamhost or plan to host a bandwidth heavy podcast (like myself), I’d suggest you sign up to Servage instead. While Dreamhost gives your over 1 terrabyte of bandwidth every month, it seems to be capped daily which can affect your podcast listeners from downloading files when released. Servage, on the other hand, doesn’t.

Other Web Products

When developing e-commerce or websites that deal with sensitive data, you should really be operating the system on a secure connection known as an SSL certificate. You can buy an SSL starting at just $14.99 from Go Daddy in their SSL Sale - such a low cost for ease of mind with your web app.