Now that I discovered the niche that I wanted to use I had to find a good domain name for that niche, grab it from a domain hoster and evaluate hosting options. I knew that I had to pay roughly $10 per year for the domain name and I decided to search for a host where I did not have to pay more than $5 per month. This would mean that I could operate the website for $70 per year which would be still under my budget, but since I want to achieve results in three months I did calculate $25 for hosting and domain for that time.

I prefer to buy domain names with keywords in them. All domain registrars offer a domain search tool which gives you information about the domain name and the most common extensions. You get information if the domain is available or taken and probably some suggestions as well. One tool that works nicely is the domain it domain suggestion tool for instance.

I normally start by entering the keywords, in this case babyphatshoes into the domain box and see what happens. It turned out that most domains were unavailable. The best domain extensions in my opinion are com, then net and then the rest with some that I would never use because many people think of them as spammy domain extensions, think .info for instance.

The domain that was free and that I picked in the end was baby-phat-shoes.net. It’s not a perfect name with two hyphens but it will do. I did register the domain at Namecheap.com but any other registrar would be as good I guess with a few exceptions. Godaddy.com is nice as well. I did not look for coupon codes which could have saved me a few bucks.

Now that I had the domain name I needed hosting. Picking the right host should take you a while if you never done that before. I researched webmaster suggestions in forums like Digitalpoint and Namepros to finally come up with Fused Hosting. I was not able to find to many bad reviews about them and their Shared 1 hosting package for $2.95 was exactly what I was looking for.

I needed PHP and MySQL support, some webspace (1 Gigabyte) and enough bandwidth (50 Gigabytes) so that I would not run into any complications. They have cpanel which is an excellent administration frontend that helps you create and administrate everything related to your hosting account.

Setup was immediate and it took less than a day to have everything up and running. All I needed to do was to redirect the DNS entry from Namecheap to point to the DNS servers at Fused Hosting. Support can help you with it if you run into troubles.

The $2.95 was even below the limit of $5 that I set. I could get a discount for paying the fee for three, six or twelve months. Still, it meant that I paid only $36 for one year of hosting plus $10 for the domain name. Less than $50 to get everything going.

Fused Hosting does have smaller packages as well which I did not see when I registered the hosting account there. The cheapest is $1.95 for 512 Megabytes of space and 20 Gigabytes of bandwidth which should be more than sufficient for the first months and probably even the first year. It’s possible to upgrade the account at any time.

Before I forget it. You have to check on trademark issues if you select the brand name in the domain. My suggestion would be to call the brand directly and ask them if it is ok to create a fansite with that name.