Online Entrepreneur’s Guide – What Are Domain Names and Why Should You Care for It?

In this tutorial, we shall discuss one of the most important parts of any online business – Domain names. We will try to understand its importance, and how it can affect the overall success or failure of a venture. And finally, we will configure ways to select the best domain names for your business.

What are domain names?

In a very layman term, domain name is your business name. As in offline business, you choose a name of your business to start with, in online business environment; domain name is the name of your website and your business, which people will associate with when they will remember you. Technically, domain names are easy to remember names for a particular IP address. IP or Internet Protocol Address is the name of a computer or a server. When a person wants to open a website, say example.com, then internally, your computer’s IP address will try to connect with the IP address of example.com and the whole communication will work via codes.

A domain name is an easy to remember English name for a long and difficult IP address.

To better understand the process, let us assume that you want to open example.com. The IP address of example.com is 198.102.434.8. Now, when you will enter www.example.com in your address bar of your web browser, then your computer will try to find 198.102.434.8 or example.com from the vast reservoir of domains existing in the virtual world, locate the computer /server which host this domain, and present the information back to you.

Hence, when you select a domain name for your business, remember that the name you are going to select would be the face of your business.

Importance of Domain Name

Say you are going to start a business of selling dog foods. In this case, you will want a domain name which resonates with the business and makes it easier for your potential customers to remember and recall when needed. Thus, you should select a domain name such as dog-food-center.com or food-which-dogs-love.com etc. On the other hand, in case you choose a generic domain name such as food-for-all.com or good-food.com then it won’t be so handy and cool as there is no element of dogs and foods combined. An easy to remember domain name which resonates with the business and its utilities will ensure that your website gets more and more traffic along with more sales.
Website hosting services, on the other hand is all together another matter, which shouldn’t be confused with domain names. In the hosting department, it is important to have the best servers such as dedicated servers, linux VPS server or shared hosting for maximum leverage and performance.

For a successful business enterprise, it is important to have a good and memorable domain name, along with a powerful and robust website hosting service.