Get a domain name. - If you can, try to make your address match all other addresses (like your MySpace address), and please stick to the conventions about .com, .net, .org, and the rest. If your site is selling t-shirts of women in bikinis, a .org wouldn’t really be appropriate. As far as price, no matter what the offers say, don’t pay more than ten dollars for a standard domain name. And, don’t pay more than once a year. There are some companies that make their money off overcharging people who don’t know any better. But now you do, so you have no excuse. I recommend GoDaddy for purchasing and maintaining your domains. Their prices have been fairly consistent for several years, unlike hosting companies that re-sell your domain to you. Try to use one company or entity to manage your domains and a separate one to manage your hosting needs. If you ever change hosts or if your host changes their prices drastically, you may wish you’d stuck with a domain managing service from the beginning.

Get a host. - While your domain name should only cost you a few dollars a year, your host should only cost you a few dollars a month. If you’re paying more than ten dollars on hosting each month, you’re either wasting your money or your hosting account’s capabilities. Unless you have to deal with a ton of traffic, you should consider shared hosting. It’s not the most reliable, but it’s by far the cheapest and should be adequate for most websites. Besides, if you have to upgrade to a high volume account, that just means you’ve got a terrific amount of traffic. I have used HostMonster for a while even though they have consistent service outages. The good thing is that it’s very cheap, but the bad thing is that every site on that account goes offline when it has problems. The outages don’t last too long, but you can imagine what it’d be like if you had a dozen websites and they were all offline at once.

Tie your domain to your host. - Almost every hosting or domain company will try to get you to transfer your domain to them in order to make it work. You don’t have to do this! The only thing you have to do is change the “nameservers” to your hosting company. They’re usually something like NS1.BLUEHOST.COM and NS2.BLUEHOST.COM or some similar variation. For example, you can have your domain registered with GoDaddy, host your website at BlueHost, and then link them together. If you decide to change hosting accounts to Site5, just change your nameservers to NS1.SITE5.COM and NS2.SITE5.COM and your site will go offline for a few minutes then “magically” re-appear as though nothing happened.