Hi I'm pretty new to this, but my partner and I are setting up a cafe and we want to set up a website. There are a few things I might get wrong so I wondered if people who know much more than me might advise before I spend money buying a website domain and then realise I made a mistake later down the road. 1) the name of the cafe is taken on virtually every .something - .com, .org, .biz etc. We were thinking of registering the name of the cafe and the town together in the format CafeTown.com - does that seem like something sensible. 2) If it is something sensible, and we then open another branch in another town nearby, we'd need to have another domain. Is there a place you can buy similar names together as a package, and if I am going to buy one, I might need to buy 3 or 4 I guess. Something like CoffeeShopNewtown.com and CoffeeShopOldtown.com, CoffeeShopBigCity.com etc. Or is it just easier to buy them as you need them. I'd hate to have each of the websites with a completely different address because someone has bought up a domain for a couple of $s. 3) What are the pitfalls of buying a website domain - where is the best place to buy it? What are the catches and the hidden costs? Thanks for you help. If I have missed anything obvious, let me know.
1.Well have you tried .co ? 2.yes godaddy.com 3.Godaddy is the best there are innumerable codes available a domain costs 0.99 at least if you use coupons
Thanks for your reply. I did look at .co, it might be one of the couple that are still available but the business is in the USA so I think your average Joe wanting to buy a (hopefully better than average) cup of Joe will just think it is a misspelling. I think the .com is essential really. I'll look at godaddy. I'll track down some codes too. Are there things like horrible renewal fees and things like that?
I recommend Namecheap.com. Good prices, 24/7 Live Support and Free WhoIsGuard for the first year on all new domain registrations. Go with them.
Go to name.com, namecheap.com or godaddy.com to register a new domain. It will cost you around $10 per year per domain. Always try to register a short, memorable domains with .com extension. It should be relevant to your site content if you want free traffic from search engines. If the domain you want was taken by someone else, try to ask its owner if he can sell it. Buying an old domain is the best choice to receive more free visitors from search engines. However you will need more than $10 to buy an old domain. The cost will depend on your expectations. You may use domaintools.com to check if it is already listed for sale on any domain marketplace or you may directly search on sedo.com, tdnam.com or afternic.com. Most of the old domains are sold for less than $500. Of course you can see a few domains which were already sold for over $100k at greatdomains.com. It's a quite wide industry. The main pitfall is to create a new site on a wrong domain. Even if you find a better domain later and redirect it to the new better domain, you can't compensate your lost caused by a wrong domain even you can't quantify your past lost. You can mainly lose 2 things with a wrong domain: if it is not memorable and you lose some forgetful visitors, if it is not related to your site content you lose some free visitors from search engines then you may need to buy visitors from some PPC campaigns. As far as I know there is no marketplace where you can buy similar old domains as a package since the domains can be listed one by one by the sellers. You can only buy such packages on forums like here since the sellers can list all of their domains on the same forum post. However it is not easy to find a particular domain package. I would buy a quality old domain (CoffeShop . com) from its owner and register the additional domains (CoffeeShopNewtown, CoffeeShopOldtown, etc.) as a group of fresh domains.
Thanks for an excellent response. It all makes sense, and I really appreciate it. I think I am going to go down this route 1) Buy a domain from namescheap.com and use their hosting service. It'll be around $9 for the name per year, and $49 for 2 year's worth of basic hosting. Does that sound like the best deal? I see people talking about $0.99 names - I can't find a coupon that brings it under $9 on names.com, godaddy.com or namescheap.com. Will there be one soon? I have time. 2) We are just a coffee shop, so we won't have lots of people buying products online. I'm not looking for people to stumble on our website when browsing really. I just want people to have the options of placing orders from their office/overnight ready for collection at a certain time. We'll do a little bit of company background, information, maybe some products but really, that is why I want a website. We're not really selling goods. If people are searching google or whatever, then I think the most logical phrase they would search for is my website address - the equivalent of BeachfrontCafeMiami.com. I think most people looking for the details/info of a coffee shop called Beachfront Cafe in Miami would put in Beachfront Cafe Miami in the search engine. So I think I am happy with that structure. It's $9.98, all the domain names with the combination of Name + neighbouring towns are available too, and they will be unless someone does something very entrepreneurial and buys them and tries to sell me them. Which will force me to change the first name, not buy the next one at $1000 or whatever, I guess. I'll see if the base name, without the town is available for something that isn't a crazy price - which it might be - I checked it and I saw you should make an offer, which might be worth it, it might not. We'll see. Either way, the domain will be memorable, it's the name of the coffee shop and the town our customers live in, and it's the logical search term. Does that all make sense? Thanks again.
I am happy to hear the info was helpful. Average hosting cost is around $5-10 on the market depending on the quality. $49 for 2 years is quite cheap. Please be sure about the hosting quality as you won't want your site go down frequently just because of the very limited hosting capabilities. Hosting is a different business. I do not buy hosting from domain registrars. They usually sell cheap but useless or problematic hosting packages. Hostgator.com is one of the most popular quality hosting. However I would choose a hosting near to my business location for a faster connection as coffee shop business is not global or very local. All of the sites get more search visitors from the places near to its hosting datacenter. Because search engines give very high importance to the speed of websites. This is an important trick which you should not forget. I see that the datacenters of hostgator.com is in Houston-TX when check it at who.is. bluehost can be another cheap, quality and well known choice. As for cheap domain registration, search "example.com coupon codes" "discount coupon" "promo code" or "promotional codes" on google. Mostly the results will be expired codes but you can find a few current coupon codes which works for you when you try to checkout your shopping cart. yes I understood, coffeshop is a local business and doesn't need or can't afford to buy generic high quality domains especially at beginning of business. So, registering a domain same as your offical business/company name may be the best choice for you until you are financially ready to dominate a notable market share within an enough geographic area. A good website can help greatly to create brand loyalty which is essential for the businesses like yours. You can use your site to announce anything related to your business. Your customers can contact you through a website, you can collect their feedbacks/questions about your service quality, etc. Also you can arrange your site later to sell your products online whenever you need. Good luck
I recommend you SEDO, domainnews forums and namepros forums. I'm seeing a lot of domain names are being sold there.
Here are my preferences: 1. Name.com 2. Namecheap.com 3. Godaddy.com All the 3 companies are the best ones. I own domains from all these 3 companies and didn't find any issues with any of them.