All you need to know about domains and hosting
If you are not technical by nature the world of hosting and domains may seem difficult and full of jargon and acronyms. To help you understand we will explain the main components.
What are the different types of hosting
With hosting you generally get what you pay for. It is a highly competitive industry and you will be paying for higher performance and capability. That said there are a number of different options that will suit different types of businesses.
Web builders
Web builders are applications that include the hosting and provide you with a drag and drop method to build relatively simple websites. The best known examples are Wix, Squarespace and Wordpress and they generally cost from roughly £5 to £50 per month based on the features and support levels you need.
For a startup or sole trader these can be a good place to start as they are simple to use and are relatively low effort and cost.
Shared hosting
If you want to run your own website without the recurring monthly costs and perhaps with a little more customisation the next step is shared hosting.
Shared hosting means you are sharing a server with many other accounts. This means the server resources are shared with hundreds of other websites.
Usually these websites are small and not resource intensive but each provider will allow a varying amount of accounts so they tend to be slower but they are cheap. Together with a free open source Content Management System such as Wordpress, Joomla or Drupal they allow you to build any website you need.
Well Known examples of shared hosting are Heart Internet, HostGator or GoDaddy
Virtual Private Servers (VPS)
Virtual private servers act like shared hosting but the resources are fixed and allocated to you. This usually means you will choose the number of cores (processing units), the RAM (memory) and disk space you wish to reserve for your website. This is more important if you are running eCommerce or other resource heavy applications on your website. Be sure to setup your VPS in a location closest to your customers.
Key provides of VPS are Kamatera, WPX or Fasthosts
Managed hosting
One of the issues with VPS servers is that you begin to need SysOps knowledge. That means you need to know about server setup, security, configuration and management. This is often beyond most people's knowledge and this is where Managed Hosting comes in. The hosting company manages and supports the server and the primary software, for example Wordpress, and you simply manage the website themes, plugins and content. Obviously you pay a premium for this service but for small to mid sized companies that run business critical websites the price is worth paying for the peace of mind.
Good examples of managed servers are Pagely, WPEngine, Kinsta and GetFlyWheel
Cloud services
Cloud services are like a box of lego for web applications and networks. They provide hundreds of different services and servers that are combined to build network and web application infrastructure. If you are reading this they are probably beyond your scope but they can provide specific services like Amazon Web Services (AWS) Simple Storage Service (S3) that allows for cheap file storage and is the backbone behind service like DropBox.
The primary Cloud Service Providers are Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Microsoft Azure as well as some interesting hybrids like DigitalOcean or Linode.
What do I need as a sole trader or SME
Now you have a clearer idea of what the different types of hosting are we can look at the main components of business systems. When you are small many of these are not needed or can be managed via Excel or a small database program.
Secured website
A website is now almost a requirement for any size business. Even a single page with your contact details and a basic listing of your services would work as a starting point and £5 or £10 a month for a Website builder or Shared Hosting with Wordpress and a free theme will get you up and running.
A small well written website is fair more effective than a sprawling mass of pages of waffle. Ensure you have an XML sitemap and that your sitemap is submitted to Google, Bing and other search engines.
SSL Certificates
An SSL certificate both verifies a website's identity and enables an encrypted connection to prevent modification or access of data by bad actors. Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) is a security protocol that enables encrypted data between a web server and a web browser.
You need SSL to keep customer information private and, if you are using eCommerce, SSL is used to secure transactions.
Most hosts provide the free SSL certificates from LetsEncrypt but lower cost providers often force you to buy a certificate so it’s worth doing your research before you buy.
Email Management Service (EMS)
Email marketing is an important part of keeping in contact with your customers. There are many simple email marketing systems such as MailChimp and Campaign Monitor as well as more feature laden options such as SendInBlue, HubSpot and Constant Contact.
These allow you to separate your day to day email from your marketing emails as well as manage lists and segmentation.
It is important to measure your engagement via open rates and unsubscription rates to make sure you are sending emails to people that are interested.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
For slightly larger companies with a growing sales and marketing team a CRM might be useful to ensure that the sales and marketing pipeline can be organised in a coherent manner and budgeting and forecasting can be more effectively understood. They are also important for delivering consistent customer service.
As a small business starting out with CRM offerings from HubSpot, SalesFlare and PipeDrive are good entry points and if you are an eCommerce driven business you should perhaps consider Drip
Understanding Domains
Probably the biggest area of confusion for small business owners is domain names. While we all understand google.com is the web address of Google what else do domains do?
Global vs UK domains
First of all it is important to understand the difference between Global domains (.com, .net and .org managed by ICANN ) and Country Code registries such for .co.uk. .uk or any domain suffix with .uk in it like .gov.uk. ccTLD have specific companies that manage domain names for a nation. . In the UK it’s Nominet.
Perhaps you have seens domains that end in .io (assigned to the British Indian Ocean Territories) or .ly (assigned to Libya). These domains are intended to show that the users of the domains trade in a specific area although you can see from the examples it is not strictly enforced.
In general it is better to go for a Global domain but in some instance you may wish to use a .uk domain because it is either cheaper, usually around £7pa rather than £12pa for global, or because the GTLD is already taken.
Registration & Registrars
Almost all domains are bought through secondary level registrars like NameCheap, GoDaddy or your hosting company. They register with the relevant domain authority for you. It is essential that you ensure your domain contacts are kept up to date.
The process of transferring your domain from one place to another will depend on the domain authority. For UK domains it is managed via ISP Tags and GTLD are managed through unlocking and an Auth Code.
Your domain does not have to be in the same place as your hosting but it is often more convenient to do so.
Nameservers and DNS
Name servers tell the internet where the various parts of your domain are located. For example an A record for the subdomain www will tell the internet what IP address to go to to find www.yourdomain.com. A domain is split into the various services such as your webserver, your mail server and any other services you run using subdomains and DNS to point those subdomains to addresses as well as providing verification services for a domain.
Understanding Subdomains
When you buy a domain such as yourdomain.com you may wish to have different services show at different addresses. You may want www.yourdomain.com to point to your webserver, mail.yourdomain.com to point to your mail server, support.yourdomain.com to point to your CRM and shop.yourdomain.com to point to your ecommerce server. Anything preceding your domain name is a subdomain.
Domain Name System (DNS)
We can break down DNS into some clear categories;
A Records
A records point subdomains, or your primary domain to an IP address. For example www A 123.456.7.8 points the www subdomain to the IP address 123.456.7.8
CName Records
CNames point subdomains to other web addresses. So they might point the subdomain mail to another server like cmail.mailserver.com
Text Records
Text records are used to verify domains to 3rd party services and are made up of a key and a value. An example would be my_verification=aDsNnI25uH612GfasDg6
Text records are very important in securing your email to prevent people spoofing your domain. We will investigate this further later on in the article.
MX Records
MX records tell email servers where to deliver your mail and have a priority so you can have multiple email servers. For example if you set a priority to a lower level the email will try to be delivered there first. For example MX 10 primary.mailserver.com and MX20 secondary.mailserver.com
Setting Up Email correctly
Email is important to a business and preventing bad actors from using your domain for spam and phishing attacks is crucial to staying off blacklists, poor spam scores and more crucially reputational damage.
SPF, DKIM and DMARC
Spam and phishing operations often fake or forge the domains they send their email messages from. TXT records are used by core email authentication methods that enable mail servers to know if an email has originated from a reputable source. By configuring the SPF, DKIM and DMARC TXT records you can make it much more difficult for bad actors to misuse your domain.
There are many tools that can be used to help you set these up correctly.
SPF records
Sender Policy Framework (SPF) records list all the servers that are recognised as legitimate servers to send email messages from your domain.
DKIM
DKIM works by securely signing each email. The public key of a cryptographic pair is held in a TXT record that the receiving server can check to see if the email is actually sent from correct server.
DMARC
(see https://www.globalcyberalliance.org/dmarc/)
A DMARC TXT record references the domain's SPF and DKIM policies. And then determines what to do with your email if it fails checks.
If you still need help setting up your digital systems you can now speak to your digital agency with a little more knowledge and avoid being baffled by jargon and acronyms.
This article was written for the Digital Springboard