What you need to get started
There are three pieces of advice I can give for someone
starting a new tech/hardware review site:
One: Get a domain name. This is a
must! You will never ever be taken seriously without one. Go to
Network Solutions and
start searching. Most of the good names are taken but if you're creative I'm
sure you can come up with something. For example, my Forums moderator, Kincaid,
started his tech site with the domain name
pcextremes.com. I would have
thought for sure that would have been taken.
It is always a good idea to register the .com, .net and
even the .org domain for the name you want. This way you don't have people
trying to leech off your site by using the same domain name as you, but ending
in .net or .org. This was my mistakes when I setup The Tech Zone. I only
register thetechzone.com. A few months later some jerk registered
thetechzone.net right under my nose. I'm still trying to get the name back.
When picking a domain name it's a good idea if the name
starts near the beginning of the alphabet or with a number. This is because
search engines like Yahoo list their results beginning with a number, then A to
Z. So if your site name starts with an A, like
AnandTech or
ArsTechinca, you're
listed near the top. One of my friends used this little trick for his site,
1 World Of Jokes. By
putting a 1 in the domain name his site is listed at the top of the Yahoo
listing of joke sites. A Yahoo listing is worth its weight in gold, especially
if you're at the top.
Two: Your site must have unique contents.
If you plan to just post news from other sites, you can forget about ever
becoming a big site. People can read news anywhere. It's covered very well by
sites like Voodoo Extreme
and Blues News. Unique
contents mean reviews and articles. Without it people have no reason to visit
your site again and networks will never consider you.
Three: Make sure your web host can handle
your traffic. At first this will not be a problem, but believe me, once you
start doing a few Gigs of traffic each day, your web host will either kick you
out or force you to buy a dedicated server. No web host providers offer true
unlimited traffic.
The choice of a web host can make or break a website. I'm
sure we've all seen those $19.95 per month web hosts offering unlimited traffic,
right? Well, let me fill you in on a secret. It's all BS. No web host in the
world can offer you unlimited traffic for $19.95 per month. If you read the fine
print in the contract they always cover their butt with something along the
lines of "we let you go unmonitored up till you do xx gig of traffic, then we
charge you". Some web host will "throttle" your account if you go over their
limit.
So many websites run into problems with web hosting when
they get big that it needs more discussion. Which we will do next.
Next
page: Finding a host
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