Introduction to Domains, Hosting, and Ecommerce

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• Recommended Domain Service: GoDaddy 
• Recommended Website Builder: GoDaddy
• Recommended Hosting Service: GoDaddy
• Shopify Ecommerce Service: Shopify

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• Review of Best Website Builders 2024

An Introductory Guide to Domains, Hosting, and Ecommerce

In this section, we provide an overview of the key components of online business: domains, hosting, and ecommerce. We'll break down what they are, why they're essential, and how to navigate them effectively to establish and grow your online presence.

Introduction to Domains, Hosting, and Ecommerce – Transcript

Websites, website hosting providers, email hosting providers, domains, ecommerce solutions, payment processors — if you've never built a website before, trying to figure out where your small business should live on the internet can get intimidating pretty quick. But don't worry — this video will help you get everything ironed out. 

Hey everybody, Will Scheren here from the Small Business Startup Guide by TRUiC. This video is part of a large course dedicated to helping small business owners cut through the noise and get to the essentials of starting and operating their business. If that sounds like it would be really useful to you, be sure to like and subscribe.

We found that for a lot of non-techie business owners, words like website, hosting, domain, payment processors, and ecommerce can get jumbled and confusing. So let's get a quick vocab lesson out of the way. 

To do this effectively, it's helpful to compare setting up your online presence to purchasing a building for your business. Your website in the analogy would be the physical building, but before you purchase a building, you need an address to describe where your building would be located. 

Think of your domain as your website's address. But instead of numbers on a mailbox, your domain is what users will type into the address bar in their web browser to find your website. Your domain is what comes after the www. It's unique and can't be shared between websites, just like an address can't be shared between properties. You'll need to purchase a domain address for your website from a domain and hosting provider. 

In our building analogy, the hosting provider would be like the architect. A hosting provider is a company that enables businesses and individuals to make their websites available through the World Wide Web. Common hosting providers are GoDaddy, Squarespace, and Wix. 

At TRUiC our mission is to offer all our resources and information for free - but we support our work by using affiliate links, meaning we earn a commission on many of the amazing deals we’ve negotiated for you. Full transparency, GoDaddy is one such affiliate partner. Link in description below. 

Your hosting provider will provide you with a few services. First, they'll help you register your domain name so that you have the rights to the address for your website. They'll also help you purchase the plot of land that your online presence sits on. 

Did you know that every website's data is stored on a physical drive that's actually somewhere in the world? Most website data sits on a hard drive that's next to some other hard drive in some giant warehouse of hard drives. So your website hosting provider will sell you space on one of those hard drives that will store all of your text, images, payments, customer information, and products for your website. 

Your website in the analogy would be the actual building that you place at your address. It’s what people see when they type your domain name into the address bar. But to have a website to show off, you'll need a way to design it, and your hosting provider will likely help you do that.

The most popular hosting providers make website design more simple by offering drag-and-drop templates and framers for you to build a professional-looking website without needing to know how to design or code it yourself. 

You'll also need a professional email hosting provider. This is like the mailbox in front of your building. It allows people to connect with you at the domain that you registered your website at. 

You'll also need to select a payment processor. Popular payment processors are Stripe, Square, and PayPal. Payment processors are like the cash register that you place in your building. Online payment processors help you to accept payments, provide refunds, manage your inventory, keep a customer database, and keep a history of your transactions. 

Another thing that you'll want to consider adding to your website is an ecommerce solution. In our building analogy, the ecommerce solution would be like the shelves, product tags, and signage that you put in your building to display your products and tell people what they need to know about them. 

Common standalone ecommerce providers that you can add to your website are WooCommerce and Shopify. But many website hosting providers are offering ecommerce solutions as well now. Your ecommerce provider will host your product's name details, price, and images. And it will communicate with your payment processor to help you complete your customers' transactions. 

One of the most confusing decisions that a business owner faces when getting their business off the ground is selecting providers for each of these services that will scale as they grow. Some of the providers that we've mentioned in this video offer various services, and some of them communicate with each other better than others. 

And it can all get pretty technical, too, especially when you consider more advanced details like their ability to maximize your business ability to be seen through SEO or how you can manage your DNS records when connecting other software to your website. 

Luckily, though, we've considered all of that for you when building this course. We won't be diving into the heavy details, but for just about every small business owner in the United States, we'd recommend using GoDaddy as your domain, website hosting, and ecommerce provider, and connecting Stripe, PayPal, and Square to your website for your payment processors, and that you use Gmail for your professional email hosting services. 

We'll dive into the why of each of these decisions later in the course. But for now, know that we chose these vendors because of their SEO capabilities, ease of integration with one another, design proficiencies, and ability to scale. 

The only concession that we'd make on the vendors that we chose is that you'll find it difficult to be in control of every single pixel on your website. And you may not be able to replicate or create design esthetics that inspired you from other websites. But we consider having complete control over the way that your website looks to be one of the least important factors that you should consider when designing your small business website. 

In the next video in the course, we're going to walk through showing you how to purchase your domain and web hosting from GoDaddy and how to purchase your professional email services through Google Workspace. 

Again, this video is part of a pretty large course that provides step-by-step instructions for small business owners to cut through the noise and get to the essentials of starting and operating their business. 

Be sure to like and subscribe to get more of this content. We'll see you in the next video, and if you have any questions, let us know.