How to Backup Your Website

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If you are like most folks on the Internet, you are using an email address that you got from your Internet Service Provider. Chances are that its not pretty, not easy to remember. You can improve on it and for less than ten bucks.

What happens to your email address if you change Internet Service Providers. Will they let you keep that old email address and forward mail to you, like the Post Office? Probably not. How many places is your email address found? Your own websites, Newsletter Subscriptions, and how many more that you will never think of? If its already out there in lots of places, you will have a problem making everyone aware of a new one. It kinda keeps you locked in to your existing ISP.

To avoid this problem, get your own domain name. If you are going to do any business online, its one of the first things you should do. Even if you don’t intend to do business online, I think you should get your own domain name. You might get your own name as your domain name. Its getting harder and harder to do that as the number of users grows.

There are lots of places to get domain names. There is also a wide range of prices. Shop around and you’ll save money. I suggest that you stick with a domain name ending with .com because that’s what lots of people think of when they think of a domain name.

You don’t have to get hosting to get email at your own domain name. You can have a “hit” on that domain name forwarded to any website that you might have hosted now. Sometimes you can get a website hosted for free through you ISP or from Yahoo or several others. Forwarding is when someone enters your new domain address like www.globalsales.com into their browser, they are actually sent to your free site at, say, http://www.geocities.com/myfreesite/ . Just think for a minute, which of those two addresses is likely to get the most visitors?

While you don’t have to get hosted, its getting so inexpensive to have your own hosting account that it is something you should do as soon as time and budget allows. There is quite a range of prices here, so shop around for hosting services.

But back to email. For under ten dollars a year, you can get your own domain name and a 5-box email forwarding account from http://go-domainnames.com/ . You just go to their site and enter a domain name of you choice to see if it is available. Keep trying until you find one that you like.