In this article, I am going to focus on buying and setting up the primary domain name for the brand, along with the hosting and email services.
The purpose of this article is to outline the approach and is not so much a “hosting for beginners”. This article contains some technical information, so if you’re not familiar with this, I have provided some helpful links that go into this in more detail at the end of the article.
Before we get started though, it may be tempting to sign up with any hosting company (especially the budget ones) but I urge caution that you do a little research first. Making the right decisions before setting up your website and email and having to move, not only is time-consuming but can end up with you having no website and no sales!
This article is fairly long and so I hope you stay for the duration, otherwise cherry-pick the sections that you find most interesting and come back for the rest.
Choosing the Domain Name
By now you most likely know that I have decided on a brand name and already knew the domain name I was going to purchase (both the .com and .co.uk were available).
My domain name registrar of choice has been Namecheap.com for several years now. They offer a very reliable service at a very affordable price, which if all you ever buy is 1 domain it price doesn’t matter, but if you own 50+ domains then it all adds up and I know people that own over 250 domains.
Whilst Namecheap does offer a number of other services, I only ever use them for buying domain names.
Most of the domains I manage in my Namecheap account, there are times I use DNS services elsewhere. Namecheap is fine for standard DNS but there are other bespoke solutions, such as failover and DNS monitoring – see below which I do elsewhere.
About DNS and Why It’s Important
DNS is complex and can be incredibly difficult to understand, it boggles me from time to time when I have to set up web hosting and email still, and I have been working in this field for over 18 years now.
This is a very brief overview, if you're looking for more in-depth information check out the amazingly titled – Steves Internet Guide – DNS for beginners.
DNS is short for Domain Name System and is critical to the Internetworking as it maps a name (domain name) to a number called IP address. Having a domain name is much easier for us to remember and type than a series of numbers!
Every computer connected to the Internet has an IP address, so when you have services like web hosting or email, these have unique names and IP addresses
The mapping of domain names to IP addresses is managed by root servers within a number of different organizations around the World (you can see them here.
When you register a domain name you will need to update the DNS in order for your website and other Internet-related services to work.
DNS Management and Monitoring
As I said earlier, Namecheap provide an easy way to manage your DNS, but there is another solution if you’re looking for a more sophisticated way of monitoring and updating your DNS.
DNSMadeEasy offer a fast and reliable way to manage DNS and is cost-effective from $29.95 per year to manage up to 10 domains (Small Business Package). I went with the “Business package” at $59.95 per year as I needed the Failover Records ( up to 3 ), which the “small business package” doesn’t offer. You can customize each package though if you need a few more domains.
One of the really cool features is the DNS Analytics where you can see domain activity in either raw logs or visually (line and bar charts, interactive maps, tables, etc). This feature allows you to troubleshoot potential issues and importantly anything suspicious like Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks.
I also like DNSMadeEasy as you can create what’s called “Vanity Nameservers”, which allows you to re-brand the name servers using your own domain name as the hostname.
Ns0.mysupergreensbrand.com
Ns1.mysupergreensbrand.com
Lastly, using and in my opinion most importantly DNSMadeEasy allows you to make incredibly fast DNS record updates. For those of you that work in DNS, this can be a real problem, a friend of mine recently had to wait 48 hours for his changes to propagate.
Once you have your domain in the control panel you can easily create and edit your DNS records and within minutes they take effect. If you have ever had the stress of waiting for a DNS change to happen, then you will understand this service is worth every penny.
Failover DNS
This is the 2nd biggest reason for selecting DNSMadeEasy as it makes it very easy to set up one or more backup IP addresses that is used only if the primary IP address is unavailable.
Failover DNS works by monitoring your primary IP address every 2 to 4 minutes from different locations. If two or more monitoring nodes fail to access the primary IP address then the DNS record is automatically updated to the backup IP address.
That’s not all, the primary IP address is continually monitored and when this is accessible the DNS record is updated back to the primary IP address.
https://dnsmadeeasy.com/services/dnsfailover/
Web Hosting Setup
If you’re not using a hosted e-commerce solution like Shopify then you need to take care of the web hosting yourself. This isn’t a problem for me as I have been hosting websites for myself and previous clients for a number of years now.
There are many solutions ranging from cheap budget hosting from the likes of Hostgator to full managed servers from companies like UKFast.
For fast, reliable hosting with great support my go to company is SiteGround and DigitalOcean.
Siteground is a much more user-friendly service as you get a control panel access to manage all the features, and so it’s perfect for anyone new to web hosting. In contrast DigitalOcean requires more techy knowledge and a more hands-on approach and at least a basic understanding of command-line SSH. Both have their pros and cons.
SiteGround Pros and Cons
Check out SiteGround Hosting options.
SiteGround Pros
- Fast and effective support team
- Good server speed – migrating sites to Siteground can improve your site speed!
- Multiple data centres around the World
- Control panel to easily manage your site
- Easily set up WordPress sites in minutes
- Hosting 1.9 million domains
SiteGround Cons
- Resource limits – popular sites with lots of traffic may find limitations
- Data storage limits (10-30GB)
- First year is fairly cheap but costs goes up after one year
DigitalOcean Pros and Cons
Check out DigitalOcean Hosting options.
DigitalOcean Pros
- Global cloud-based servers from as little as $5 per month
- Quick and easy to set up cloud server “droplets” (within 60 seconds)
- Amazing 99.9% uptime
- Solid State Drives (SSD) storage
- Pay for what you use model
- Easily scalable – you need more server resources
- Offer offsite backups and snapshot services
DigitalOcean Cons
- Only Linux servers with no windows OS
- Requires some technical knowledge to manage
- No control panel like Cpanel, unless you install yourself
- Limited support – manage and support server yourself
Server Backups and Failovers
Often overlooked even by seasoned website owners, backups are essential to every digital business and so too is your failover plan if your web hosting goes down. Assuming you make money from your site then every minute your site is down you are losing money.
Whether you’re using a shared hosting solution like SiteGround or a VPS like DigitalOcean who can offer regular offsite backups as part of their hosting solution,.it’s my opinion you should always take a belt and braces approach, and you should invest in a secondary backup service. As I said it’s the cost of not doing this.
Failover solutions require more thought as this is not something that is typically offered by many hosting companies. What I mean by “failover” is having a complete functioning backup of your site online in another location, this will of course need to be on another server.
It may seem like overkill when you’re just starting out, but experience tells it makes sound business sense to have an idea of what will happen if your website goes down.
It’s worth mentioning there are many reasons for a website to go down; server hardware, infrastructure, or any number of reasons in the network, or even an update to your site can take your site down. A failover plan means that you can switch to the backup site to avoid downtime which to you is money. The point here is you don’t complain about the cost of fire service, you pray you don’t need them.
I am considering using a hosted shopping cart solution (more on this in another post) so that I can have static sites, static are much easier to host and replicate across servers. For the sort of failover service I am looking for, I need a solution to monitor the IP address of my website, if the IP stops responding then there is an automatic change, and DNS switches to my failover site.
If you’re using a shared hosting solution such as SiteGround then it is standard practice to host on separate infrastructure, which really means selecting another hosting solution as a backup. Remember this is in case your primary website a server hosted in the same data center is also open to the same problems that affect the whole datacentre.
If you’re on a budget and can’t afford a failover, then invest in a great backup service that keeps a working backup of your site offsite. I can’t stress this enough, you should also test your restore and practice what you need to do to restore your site! The time to try a restore for the first time is not when your website goes down.
To help with setting up DigitalOcean servers (or droplets as they call them) you can use a web-based platform called commando.io that allows you to set up and manage servers online. They have what they call “recipes”, which are server code libraries that help to install and manage your server.
Digging around for Failover solutions for DigitalOcean I stumbled across this on Quora:
You can have 3 servers through Digital Ocean and have a corosync/ pacemaker setup where if one node goes down, a floating IP auto-shifts to another node. Then you can sync all of your files using sync thing so the three servers are always serving the same data. All this for $16 /month. Plus they give you step by step tutorials on how to set everything up. [Answer by Gregory Kelley on Quora]
Content Delivery Networks (CDN)
A content delivery network, or CDN for short, is a group of servers located around the World set up to deliver content to visitors as fast as possible. So, instead of saying a UK visitor having to wait for content to be sent from a US-based server, it can be routed and delivered by a nearer server.
The use of CDNs increases year-on-year as it's one of the most effective ways to deliver content with high performance and reliability on a global scale.
Check out KeyCDN's article on content delivery technology here.
CDN Benefits
There are a number of benefits to using a good quality CDN, such as:
- Improve site performance
- Boost reliability
- Scale much easier
- Increased security
- Lower hosting costs
The main benefit for me is the improved site performance and reliability. Site speed is incredibly important from both a visitor perspective but also an important ranking factor for Google.
Source: wpmudev.org
There are a number of recommended CDN settings when looking to configure your first CDN – I will create a follow-up post on this and update here.
Which CDN Should I Use??
There are many companies that offer good CDN services and choosing one to use can be tricky as they offer a number of options, some of which can be confusing if you're not familiar with CDNs.
One company that stands out when researching for the best CDN provider is MaxCDN – now part of stackpath.com.
For only $10 USD per month you get unlimited sites, 1TB bandwidth per month and DDos protection – your first month FREE too.
Email Setup
I live in SE Asia and it always amazes me when I see businesses using free email accounts, such as Hotmail or Gmail. Not only does this not look unprofessional, it means you are at the mercy of the company who effectively owns your email address.
Business email is often cheaper than web hosting. It’s so cheap these days to buy a domain name and web hosting companies often include a control panel where it’s a straight forward process to set up your own email on YOUR domain name.
That said, it’s much better to use paid-for mail service for better reliability and also means you separate your web hosting from your email services. So, in a worst-case scenario that your web hosting service goes down then you can still send and receive email and vice versa.
The fact is paying for a reliable and decent mail service means you’re unlikely to experience downtime with your email.
Email Service Providers
Where business email is concerned there are three big players in the market, I have used two of them.
- Gsuite is Google’s business package starting from $5 per user per month (paid annually),
- Office 365 is Microsoft’s business mail solution, it provides native Outlook connectivity plus cloud storage and starts at $5 per account as well, if you need an Office license then for $12.50 you can spread the cost MS Office across the year as well.
- Finally there is Zoho mail that is a little cheaper from $1 to $6 per user per month (paid annually).
I use Gsuite for another business but for my supplement brand email I decided to go for Zoho mail and selected the “standard package” at a very reasonable $3 per month.
ZOHO Email Set up
Once I purchased the standard package I completed the domain name information required as part of the setup.
The next step is to set up your DNS records for your account, the main thing to do is create your MX records (a type of record is used to tell the world where your mail servers are). It’s fairly simple to do if you’re familiar with updating DNS records, if not I recommend asking your web developer or hosting company to do this.
The ZOHO mail help page goes over how to do this if you up for getting your hands dirty:
If you’re wondering at any point what your MX settings are for your domain name, you can use the following site to check: https://mxtoolbox.com/
This website is excellent for checking other settings on your domain too, which I go into below.
Full article on setting up email on ZOHOmail here.
A quick tip here to save wasting an hour of your time. When setting up ZohoMail on your mobile device and computer that having Two-factor authentication on will mean you need to slightly change your configuration settings – I wasted time and lost a few more hairs over this!
Improving Email Deliverability – DKIM and SPF
Ensuring emails are received and sent effectively is a big deal these days as more and more mail servers fight against the increasing problem of spam.
There are some DNS settings you can make that can increase the reliability of having your email received – three in particular called SPF, DMARC, and DKIM.
Now, I am not an expert on this so I asked my good friend David Brookfield who has been involved in IT both personally and professionally for over 25 years now. David wrote a really awesome article and was really in-depth, check out the post on improving email deliverability with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC.
Summary – Tech Setup That Scales!
So this wraps up the setup I am going to use for my domain name, DNS, web hosting, backups, failover sites, and email.
To quickly recap my setup.
- Registered Domain with Namecheap
- Using DNSMadeEasy for DNS management and to monitor my website IP address
- USA Web hosting with DigitalOcean on two servers; one main website and the other backup
- ZOHO Mail Standard Package for my mail
This setup although required a little planning it’s a cost-effective solution for having a robust hosting setup with some redundancy.
What I like about this approach is that it's scalable too. Need more server resources, easy to do just purchase more via DigitalOcean. Want more email accounts, likewise with ZOHOmail you can add them to your account.
There are lots of ways of setting up your website and email infrastructure this is what works for me. I hope you found this solution useful, let me know in the comments below.