Domains and Hosting

What are domains and hosting accounts?

Both domains and hosting accounts are essential to your website. In fact, you can’t display a website on the internet without them.

Domain: The website address, or URL, for your website. e.g. polarwebdesign.com.au

Hosting: A server, or computer, that hosts the files of your website and serves them to your website visitors.

Website Updates: Your WordPress website will need to be maintained with regular plugin updates (more info below).

You can manage your domain, hosting and updates yourself, or we can do it for you. Details for both options are below.

If you missed our explainer video on domains and hosting, you can watch it here:

 

Option 1:  Do It Yourself

If you start looking around you’ll find that there are thousands of domain registrars and hosting providers around the world. Some of them are great, and others not so great.

To make it easy for you we’ve listed some of our recommendations for you to use:

 

Domains:

Our top pick for domain registrars is Panthur.com.au, an Australian based registrar with reliable service and good prices.

You can visit Panthur here and follow the prompts to register your preferred domain.

Note that a .com.au domain will require you to input your ABN, and you will need to register it for 2 years.

The price for domains at Panthur at the time of writing this is $24 for 2 years.

 

Hosting:

Our top pick for your hosting account is NetVirtue.com.au.

This is a hosting provider with Australian based servers, helpful customer service and fair pricing.

For a regular business website we recommend their Entry Level hosting package which you can find at this link and follow the prompts to order.

At the time of writing this the price for their Entry Level package is $6.95 per month.

 

Website Updates:

Keeping your website updated is an essential step to maintaining the security of your website. When your website is ready we will send you training videos on how to keep your website updated.

These updates are simple to do and will only take you around 5 minutes to complete. We recommend performing updates once per week or fortnight.

These updates are necessary for all WordPress websites, no matter where they are hosted.

 

Important Information!

Do your own research! The recommendations we have provided are what we use for our own Australian based websites, however it is important that you do your own research and decide on the best domain registrar and hosting provider for yourself.

Make sure you keep your domain and hosting active! If you stop paying for your domain and hosting your website will no longer be available. Most providers implement automatic updates and send reminder emails so you don’t end up losing your website.

Option 2:  Leave It To Us

We get it, domains and hosting can be confusing.

Why not let us take care of this for you? Just sign up to our Hosting and Maintenance Package, which includes:

– We will register your domain on your behalf
– Your website will be hosted on our dedicated server
– We will take care of all plugin and WordPress updates, which we perform at least 3 times per week.
– Your website will be monitered 24/7 for security breaches
– We’ll create daily backups of your website on a separate server, so if anything goes wrong with your website we can get it back up and running.

You will have the option to sign up to this package on our pricing page or in your shopping cart.

If you’re still unsure about domains and hosting you can get in touch with our team for more information.