Easyspace.co.uk

You want a website but where do you start? For a long-time, I used the free web space and address provided by my ISP, BT. It served the purpose when I was playing around and teaching myself HTML, and in reality, that was all it was ever intended to do. Until, one day, I received a speculative e-mail from ‘inneedahits’ telling me they could list my website on some lesser used search engines free. Seemed like a good idea at the time. Then they offered ...
...£5 it was an even better idea, that was until the floodgates opened. I started getting visitors, not only from friends, family and fellow ciao members, but eczema sufferers across the world, some leaving messages in my guestbook, others completing my questionnaire and sending me e-mails asking for advice – eeeek! At one point, certain search strings found my website in the top 10 of search engines such as MSN, Yahoo, and in the top 20 on Google, ... more

You want a website but where do you start? For a long-time, I used the free web space and address provided by my ISP, BT. It served the purpose when I was playing around and teaching myself HTML, and in reality, that was all it was ever intended to do. Until, one day, I received a speculative e-mail from ‘inneedahits’ telling me they could list my website on some lesser used search engines free. Seemed like a good idea at the time. Then they offered me full listings for a one-off payment of less than £5 it was an even better idea, that was until the floodgates opened. I started getting visitors, not only from friends, family and fellow ciao members, but eczema sufferers across the world, some leaving messages in my guestbook, others completing my questionnaire and sending me e-mails asking for advice – eeeek! At one point, certain search strings found my website in the top 10 of search engines such as MSN, Yahoo, and in the top 20 on Google, not any more.

And I guess to this end, this op contains, among other things, a health warning. If you are going to have a proper website, and expect visitors from major search engines then you need to dedicate effort, time and energy to keeping it accurate and useful.

My first dabble with a proper website name was when I was thinking about starting my own business. I mistakenly bought a web-address and hosting for a one-off payment of £99 for the year, I was told the site would be up and running within 24 hours but took a week. Being new to this area, I also had several queries, but customer service never bothered to respond to one of my e-mails.

Colleagues and friends had their own tips for hosting companies, but I just couldn’t be bothered.

Fast-forward about 8 weeks, and I (well my other half) had a brilliant idea for a website. Namely, to record my opinions and details about all the hotels I used, of which there have been many, Ciao only gets those it actually lists, another brilliant idea gone wrong. This time I stumbled across ‘www.easyspace.com’ and for some unknown reason immediately felt comfortable with them.

WHO ARE THEY?
They are a (newly) limited company based in Surrey that has obviously seen its business expand enough to take on limited status. Easyspace provide the facility to buy your chosen domain name as long as it is available. To help with this, they have a search facility, whereby if your name is unavailable, they will tell you who owns it and when its registration expires. They will also offer you the range of domain extensions that are available with your chosen name;

For example, if you wanted to buy www.ciao.co.uk and it was unavailable, they will offer you the available alternatives, such as:

• ciao.name
• ciao.net.cn
• ciao.org.cn
• ciao.us
• ciao.tv
• ciao.org.uk
• ciao.gs
• ciao.vg
• ciao.tc
• ciao.ac

What they won’t be able to sell you is “.ac.uk” and “gov.uk” web extensions. For these, customers need to meet specific requirements such as being a UK based academic institution or government body, and are considerably dearer than those openly available on the market.

PRICE
It is not possible to give a specific price, as it varies dependent on the ‘desirable’ value of the domain extension. A “co.uk” is like to set you back £4.50 a year but must be bought for a minimum of 2-years. “.com” stacks up at £12 for the year, although the price reduces if you buy it for longer periods. The ‘tv’ extension on the other hand will cost you a whopping £26 a year. You will also find that popular and catchy names will probably already be registered by a domain company who will try to charge extortionate amounts if you really want to use it, remember when Tony Blair’s youngest was born? Someone bought up all variations of his son’s name in the hope of making some money. We recently sought out a commercial variation of our academic site and the cost was somewhere around several thousand dollars – nice work if you can get it.

So your chosen domain name is free and affordable, what next? Easyspace offer you various options starting with straightforward domain registration. Although this is not much use unless you are going to host it on your own company servers or you can buy one of a selection of web-hosting services:

BASIC
Their 30MB package at £29.88 is probably enough for most home users, and for this, you will get a free domain name of your choice thrown in. However, be aware that you will have a wonderful Easyspace banner permanently on your site. This will cost you £36 to get rid of. You will also unable to use Frontpage to upload to your website, which will set you back an extra £12; if you don’t use this option, remember you will need an FTP package to upload pages to your site

STANDARD
The next package up is the standard, coming in at £59.88 and a 100MB web-space, again you get your domain name thrown in free, and you also have free FrontPage extensions with this option. This package also requires the £36 upgrade for no banners. So, if they bother you, you can see that you are quickly moving towards the cost of the next package, where you get a whole lot more for your money.

You get a free mailbox, and can set up an extra 4, for example. Enquiries@, Information@ etc, but for an extra £24, you can add a capture everything@ guaranteeing there is even more chance of someone who may have forgotten your details being able to contact you.

BUSINESS
The next package up will set you back £129 for 200MB and as well as the services included in all packages (covered below) and those in the basic hosting, you get a secure server, CGI/iASP/PHP and MySQL Database free, although I am going to have to explore the latter two in more detail. I am assuming it means that you can run scripts and asp pages through the site. Easyspace do advise that novice users should not take advantage of the CGI upgrade, but as it was included in the price……
There are another two options (Corporate and Media) coming in a cool £199 and £275 a year, although I suspect that any of the above three packages would be suitable for most home and small business users.

As well as the packages, their secure site acts in a similar way to shopping carts for other stores, whereby you can add and remove services as required. Having played around with my order several times this morning, I can guarantee that cost wise, it is best to stick to the packages. I would probably favour the £129 package if you may wish to consider e-commerce trading in the future.

They also offer facilities to make your site fully e-commerce enabled, don’t be fooled that a secure server is enough. To take credit card payments and sell products you will need a cataloguing system and merchant bank account and won’t get much change from £1,000.
If I am buying a domain name, I tend to try to get the “.com’ and “co.uk” names, for £7, one can easily be directed to the other. Visitors will get to your site whichever name they enter in the browser.

If you already have a free complicated name website that works well for you, you can buy web-forwarding, cloaked web redirection for £12 a year. This will make visitors think they are on a top-level domain rather than a site sitting on an ISP’s server.

Each web-hosting package provides several free services including webstats, which can be e-mailed to you, stored on their server to access on-line, or both. Personally, having used www.thecounter.com to track visitors on my main site for the last couple of years, Easyspace’s service is nowhere near as useful or easy to read. In contrast to ‘thecounter’ which provides details of your last 30 visitors plus an ongoing record of their operating systems and browsers, plus details of the referring site or search engine, Easyspace only covers a rolling weeks visits. Therefore, if you want accurate records of who is using your site, I would advise using a paid for tracking service, which could cost you anything from £15 a year upwards.

They also provide an ‘Easypost’ mailbox, free e-mail forwarding, free bandwidth and free account setup.

Their website also provides a comparison chart, outlining the facilities available with each package.

YOU’VE MADE YOUR SELECTION
Now the fun bit, you have to pay for it. One extra thing to remember is that all prices on the site are exclusive of VAT, and unless you are a VAT Registered company, you can say goodbye to this.

If you don’t already have an account with Easyspace, you will now need to set one up. You will be required to enter all your home details which must MATCH exactly with those on your credit or debit card, otherwise your order may be rejected. Once sent through their secure server, you will instantly receive e confirmation order, followed swiftly by individual confirmation for each product bought. Once set up, (around 24 hours) you will receive an on-line ‘certificate’ for each domain you own. Your details will also be sent to ‘Nominet’ the official UK registry who will send you paperwork in due course, although this could take several months. If you did try to buy your domain names through Nominet, they will set you back around £80 each.

The one thing I am not keen on, is that if you have a top level domain name, it is extremely easy to find out you name, full address and telephone number, which doesn’t seem too good for individuals, although wouldn’t really be a problem for companies.

I updated my home and address details today while buying new domain names and the records for my existing sites were updated within three minutes on the official registry, not bad going.

Make sure you keep all the e-mail confirmations safely, as they contain all your access information.

WHAT NEXT?
Basically sit back and wait, you have done the easy bit, now you have to develop the site and keep it interesting and up-to-date, that’s the hard bit.

Easyspace also offer a free facility to transfer domains to them for subsequent renewals and registrations.

RELIABILITY
I have been with Easyspace for nearly a year now, and can truthfully say their site has only failed me once. This was when, for some reason, one of my pages became corrupted. Whether this was down to FrontPage or Easyspace I really couldn’t say.
I do also find that if I am logged in through FrontPage for long periods, the site will sometimes claim my webspace no longer exists. I then have to log off and back on again, but this is a little inconvenient rather than a serious problem and is probably good for security purposes.

MY OPINION
Generally, I am very pleased with EasySpace, they restored my faith after my unhelpful experience with “123domainnames”, their responses are efficient and rapid, and I have been able to find out everything I need simply by visiting their site. I have recommended them to several colleagues wishing to buy domain names, and the transfers to the relevant company servers have been done efficiently and without issue.

All in all, the only minor issue I have is with the stats facility, and having now purchased my desired company name, if I do decide to go down the route of self-employment, for less than £200 I have everything in place.

There is hundreds of domain name and hosting companies around, many providing cheaper hosting (although check the small print for bandwidth restructions). Over over the last year, found these guys reliable, trustworthy, and most importantly, still around. For more info, visit:
www.easyspace.com and have you credit / debit card at the ready.
 

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