Buying a domain name
Its a minefield that’s for sure. Most domain companies are either a rip off or are so cheap that if you ever have a problem you will go insane dealing with the cheapest support staff on the planet. Until now I have not seen any company that gets it right.
Enter hover.com, they are very well prices and have good customer support. I have moved my domain names there and am very happy. They are based in Canada I believe.
I had a little trouble transferring some domain names and it was saying the transfer codes were incorrect but I found if I retried a few times and used the firefox browser it worked.
Yes you can also buy/transfer .com.au domains from them and finally get away from the dodgy or over priced domain name companies based in Australia.
Web hosting
Also a minefield as there are so many options now and everyone has a different recommendation for you. I have dealt with many and found very few that have the balance right for performance / cost / support.
I now only recommend hostgator.com and the Business plan is the best option which costs around $US15 or $AUD17.
http://www.hostgator.com/shared
It is a great option as you get your own IP address for that prices and a free SSL certificate included. Your own IP address means you won’t end up blacklisted because a porn site sets on the same shared server with the same IP address as you which can happen on shared hosting which is what most small businesses use.
