You create your own website on Web.com for $14.99 per month.

Yup. Or go to GoDaddy, Yahoo, or the like. They do it all for you.

Web.com never heard of that one. But what if you idea gets big?

I’d say to get three things:
1) buy the domain name (like “www.YouTube.com”)
2) get a web designer/programmer to discuss your idea with
3) have your web designer recommend a web host that will have everything the designer needs

I’m a web designer (for myself! I don’t do freelance…) and if you’re planning for your site to get big, those three steps are pretty solid. Make sure the web host can easily expand your burgeoning site’s bandwidth and allotted disk space easily.

Ya know…many people are INVENTING websites that make them millions. I want to come up with one big website and I have been thinking about it.

What I think you need to do is team up with an expert website guy….go partners. you will need a website wiz to pull it off but big ideas for big bucks in websites is growing every day.

I know…the dot com bust…but everyone went in and bum-rushed the market and made a ruckus…now it is more thought out and planned, plus I believe it is very quietly the second coming around right now of the dot com era….round 2

Ron Komorowski
Inventor of Handi-Straps
www.handi-straps.com

If you have thought of a name for your Website check if the domain name is available. Godaddy is usually a great inexpensive option (if it is available, don’t hesitate and buy it): http://www.godaddy.com/

Don’t worry about hosting or programming languages for now and just focus on finding a person or a company to talk about your idea and find out the feasibility of it (both in money and technical complexity).

Are you talking about the creation of another Video Social Networking website?

You really have to have an idea of the capabilities you need from the server or hosting company. I can’t remember the proper terminology for all this stuff, as it’s been years since I was in charge of high traffic web sites. But, if you plan to dish out some big bandwidth intensive services, like streaming vids or web radio, then you need to go with a dedicated server-capable hosting company with multiple redundant servers and switching so that they can scale up capacity as your site’s popularity grows. But if you’re talking about serving up some simple data from a SQL DB, as in Craigs List, then any of the multitude of hosting companies will suffice. Also, there’s no hard and fast rule that says a successful website can’t piggyback off of another successful site. Yahoo stores, Ebay sites, Myspace, Facebook, etc. Take a look at what this young lady, Ashley Qualls has accomplished at age 17. http://www.doshdosh.com/case-study-of-teenage-millionaire-ashley-qualls/

Whatever you have in mind, good luck with it! You never know … it could be the next dot com gold mine.

A great resource is whois.com http://domains.whois.com/domain.php

Here’s what they have for edisonnation.com

Registrant:
Edison Nation
520 Elliot Street

Charlotte, NC 28202
United States of America

Registrar: DomainPeople, Inc.

Domain Name: edisonnation.com
Created on ………….Sun Jul 30 17:34:46 2006
Expires on ………….Thu Jul 30 20:34:47 2009
Record last updated on .Sun May 11 06:43:17 2008,

Administrative Contact:
Edison Nation
Louis Foreman
520 Elliot Street
Charlotte, NC
28202, US
(704)895XXXX

Technical Contact:
Edison Nation
Matt Spangard
520 Elliot Street
Charlotte, NC
28202, US
(704)-333-5335

Domain servers in listed order:
ns1.hostimagineering.com
ns2.hostimagineering.com

I’ve noticed most of the EE products end up with a dedicated web site after Branding and Marketing get hold of them. Anyone from Edison Nation feel like sharing? Do you always use the same web sever? Do retailers take over and host the product, more than just their online store page for it?

Mark,
What are you a stalker? ;-)

David,
Many (but not all) products require a dedicated Web site. Some can get along with a page at Amazon.com. Others are straight-wholesale plays and may just need an online brochure type site or an email template that has the basics.

We have a whole bunch of dedicated Web servers all across the country. We host sites on several different platforms from Ruby on Rails to Microsoft .Net. For product fulfillment, we use several different companies including Fulfillment by Amazon (in some cases).

We use many other Web services as well from as far away as Australia. My monthly credit card bill looks like I’ve been on a whirlwind tour across the 7 continents these days. Some of these resources include: Email campaign management, project management, cloud-based file storage (allows you to grow quicker without adding new servers), transaction payments, contact management… it goes on and on.

We do all of the design and programming for our sites in-house. We have a whole bunch of servers in-house for building out test environments but I’d never rely on them to actually host our sites. We leave that up to dedicated data centers.

http://www.instantdomainsearch.com is an excellent tool to find domains quickly…

Jon…isn’t it true that if you search a domain name and don’t secure it immediately someone will see you searching and claim the domain name as they hope now you will buy it from them? My website guy told me.

I do a google search for a domain name and see if it pops up….I’ll leave the .com, .net etc out of the search. No one will see I am looking to secure the domain name. Is this true? Or is my website guy wacky? Could be…

Ron,

I am sure some registrars do this. I think GoDaddy is too big of a player to risk getting caught doing that. I think they were caught bidding against their customers in domain auctions … http://digg.com/software/GoDaddy_VP_Caught_Bidding_Against_Customers

I trust InstantDomainSearch.com because, to my knowledge, the guy who runs is not into domain real-estate … but writing software. He’s a twenty something guy who wrote the site in a couple days and makes money via advertising and referrals to the registrars.

Overall, I think you’re safe with either of those sites.