Online business tips from Okinokiyo : #3 - Domain and Hosting

"What are those craps? I have no IT background!" That are most of my friends asking me. Hehe dont be scared.

#3 : Domain & Hosting
Domain is a name.
Hosting is a space.

Domain is what you type in the address bar.
Hosting is where you keep the craps. Ok..not craps. The images, the database, the template, etc.

So when you decided to have a website. What type of website you have in mind?

Often we have questions from customer why our mybirthday website is a blog type?Not a website like Kahwin.Net. The answer is, Kahwin.Net is a predefined products. While mybirthday product is a custom product. So there is no point to have a shopping cart. So its all related with the #1 tips.

Domain name must be simple and memorable. We are lucky to have Kahwin.net because now the cashier bank also remember the name only that I have to explain to them what are we doing because they taught that we are a matchmaker company. LOL!

.net, .com is cheap compared to .com.my. Not only cheap, but the registration part is simpler and fast. When you want your domain to be a .com.my, yes, it shows that it comes from Malaysia. But then, the registration of .com.my only can be done with the only registrar which formerly was mynic and now is http://www.domainregistry.my.

Since you are carrying a Malaysia name in the url, you have to be a valid company registered in Malaysia, which means you have to register your business as a company with Pendaftaran Perniagaan which the location is at Level 2 (if Im not mistaken) at The Mall, Kuala Lumpur.

Ok, we did this with mybirthday. But we register only the Kahwin.Net company. Ok, that is confusing.

We register Kahwin.Net because we have lots of money back then :p hehehe but then we dont find necessary to register mybirthday because what's the point having different company names or certs since the owner is me?Right? So we just provide/fax the Kahwin.Net registration cert and few docs to let them know, "Hello, Im the owner..." :p

And the other point to have .com.my for mybirthday is we dont ship internationally because its not worth it.

How we named them?
Kahwin.net was registered long long time ago..and by then so many simple and catchy names were available.

The history of having mybirthday name because that was the closest name I can get because the rest is gone. Most of them registered the perfect domain name but then the websites are dead, but then I think mybirthday is not that bad. :D

And okinokiyo is my dear name and I like to remember it for the rest of my life.hehehe...Only that its hard to remember and hard to spell as my husband said... Nevermind, I will wait and give it a chance.

Avoid dashes in the url or long name like www.himynameisnormaizura.com. Because human might misspell and usually its tiring to try spell so many times until they get the correct one. You are lucky if they will try until they got the correct one because Im the other human who will stop at the 2nd attempt :p.

So, domain name must be 1)easy to remember, 2)easy to spell, 3)reflecting the business.

Ok, next is Hosting.

As I mentioned in the #2 tip that Kahwin.net has a hosting since we have our own system and shopping cart, and database to store information. But mybirthday dont have anything to store as well as okinokiyo.

So, the option is yours. If you are you using wordpress as your base and you wanted to put all widget like blogspot, you have to have hosting as wordpress is not as dear as blogspot. That was the reason I move this okinokiyo back to blogspot.

How to have a website like okinokiyo and mybirthday?
Meaning base as blogspot and the domain name is a formal or a dot com name. Its easy. Explore a bit in your Settings tab > Publishing > Advance Settings.


Fill in your domain name which you have bought earlier from any domain seller, and put it there. And it will reflecting right away.

Price wise
Ok, Im bad with price.All this while we bought our domain name and hosting with Exabytes. We chose them because we have a good experience having them as our hosting company with Kahwin.net. Experience in terms of customer support. Their respond is fast.That is important. And hardly the website is down. Mostly their maintanence is midnite or 2am in the morning which the traffic is low or none at all.

And the transaction in RM. We put all our domain names and hosting under my husband account and I cant remember whether we got discount or not. But usually they have some promotion to existing customers.

Hosting + Domain = Around RM300++ per year
Domain = Around RM50 to RM80 ++ per year.

I hope that helps you people out there. Have a nice day!