3 Web Tools to Host, Build and Protect Your Website

When you put your business on the Web, you want to know that the domain host is reliable and responsive, right? Well, one of the three Web tools I recommend this week delivers on that promise.

Plus, if you’ve put off getting a website for your business, I’ve got a resource to help you build a basic website quickly and easily – even if you’re not tech-savvy at all. And finally, with this tool, you’ll never lose another customer to URL typos. Check out these Web tools and let me know what you think.

BlueHost

I’m always asked to recommend a reliable Web-hosting provider, and for a number of years I honestly couldn’t make that recommendation, but now I can.

BlueHost.com

Figure 1: BlueHost.com

I’ve had such a great experience with hosting my sites at BlueHost.com, that I have no hesitation in recommending that provider to you.  Not only is it reliable, but the customer service and support is phenomenal.

The couple of times I had questions, I called the support number on the home page, got straight through to an actual human being, who was most helpful and friendly. That’s something I’ve never experienced from a Web host before.

The hosting package offers a ton of features, CGI/databases, free website scripts, and ecommerce and multimedia features. It also includes CPanel — don’t worry if you don’t know what that is; just know that it’s a good thing that makes it easier to work with your hosting.

Edicy

If you’re a non-technical person and you want to have your own website, then you’ll love Edicy.com. It’s genuinely one of the easiest ways to create a good-looking website, and it’s free. Free is good. Head over to Edicy.com and start by taking the overview tour.

Edicy.com

Figure 2: Edicy.com

Then, to get started, simply enter your email address. No other information is required. Enter the text, add some images — it’s a drag-and-drop style interface, and you can even include a blog. You can have a fancy new website in a matter of minutes, so now there’s no excuse for not having a presence online.

Domain Typo Finder

You may or may not know this, but it’s very common for people to miss-type domain names when they’re trying to get to a certain website. There are lots of different reasons why this happens such as fingers slipping on the keyboard, dyslexic-style mixing of letters, adding or removing hyphens, look-alikes like the letter l and the number one, and so on.

Domain Typo Finder

Figure 3: Domain Typo Finder

Now when someone does that, when they miss-type, they usually don’t know it — obviously — and so they get frustrated at you, the website owner and not themselves. As frustrating as that might be there is a way to overcome this issue. Now you can use the Domain Typo Finder found at DomainTools.com. It’s a free tool that allows you to enter any domain name – an existing site or one that you plan to register — and the system will show you the most likely miss-spellings based on the factors that I mentioned just now.

Now once you know those potential errors, you might choose to register those error domain names and then forward them to your main website. That way, when someone enters your URL incorrectly, they’ll still arrive at your site, and they’ll never know. Now that’s customer service. Domain names are really cheap now, and you can easily register a dot.com, for example, for less than ten bucks for a year.

Andrew Lock is a self-described maverick marketer and the creator and host of Help! My Business Sucks, a free, weekly Web TV show full of practical small business marketing tips, advice and resources to help small businesses “get more done and have more fun.”

Do you have a comment or question about this article or other small business topics in general? Speak out in the SmallBusinessComputing.com Forums. Join the discussion today!

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