Buying a Domain Name / Building a Website on iPage

Question:

My husband and I are looking to make a website for our small business. We know the domain name isn’t taken and we just want something simple like 1 page with info about the company, so people will see it when they search on google etc… I don’t have any experience building websites, so I need some help. We’re looking for something that looks decent, but we don’t have a lot of $ $ to spend. When looking at sites like Go Daddy, iPage, etc… these all advertise things like free domain for life or $3.95/month. I know these would be easier to build a website on, but is “renting” my domain name the best option? Is it possible to just buy the domain name forever? If I do one of these and they go under, do I still have my domain name to switch to another service? Do these services produce decent pages? I just don’t want to get scammed since I don’t know much about it. Or would I be better off to just go to a local web hosting company? Someone please walk me through what the best option would be here and how to do it. Thanks for your help!

Answer:

It makes no sense to go with a local web hosting company unless you need to visit their offices for some reason. It’s not like it’s a web designer where you might need one-on-one contact.

I always recommend that people buy their own domain name rather than take the free domain name offer from a web hosting company. That way you WILL own the domain name. You can get a cheap domain name at NameCheap. There is a coupon code on that page.

If you are a newbie webmaster, goDaddy is not a good option. It’s frustrating even for experienced people, but then experienced ppl wouldn’t use them to begin with, not even for buy domain names. WAY too expensive and confusing.

iPage has a decent drag n drop website builder in the control panel and would work fine for a 1-page site. There are also some additional things in the SimpleScripts script installer in the control panel that you can use on your site. Wouldn’t hurt to take a look at them. Click here for an iPage control panel review so you can see what’s in it.

On the iPage order form, instead of the free domain name option, select the option that says transfer a domain. That only means you are transferring web hosting on the domain because they assume you’re hosted some place else. What ever you do, do NOT transfer the domain name itself away from NameCheap. You do NOT need to have the name registered at a host. Leave it in the hands of a real domain name registrar. Do NOT consolidate your domains in Domain Central in the control panel. Just ignore all of that stuff.

After you purchase the web hosting, then login to your NameCheap account and change the DNS Nameservers on the domain name to point to iPage. That’s how you link a name to a hosting account. Then nameservers are ns1.ipage.com and ns2.ipage.com. Then wait for them to resolve. The update can go as fast a 20 minutes to up to a couple of hours.

You’ll want to login to your iPage account and delete the default home page so it doesn’t interfere with the one you build. Here’s the iPage User Guide.