also any best practice to ensure your website "gets seen", gets out there so as many potential customers/visitors as poss see it

Thanks do you pay annually for hosting and registering the domain name? Are there some domains you can't register ie an example is .police.uk

why are .com more? And whats the benefits of having a .com if you were a Uk company?

And if you know any tool to see what domain names are free? plus if we have a name in mind, any suggestions on a URL - so any tools that could do that, so if we have a b c company it would list some recommended website addresses to buy?

when you search for a domain name it will show you which ones you can register.

a general list is in my previous post but repeated here:

com, net, org, co.uk, org.uk, me.uk, gb.com, gb.net, uk.com, uk.net, biz, info, eu.com, us.com, us, name

From memory you can't just register:
.sch.uk, .ac.uk, .gov, .gov.uk, .police.uk
i'm sure there are more though.

When you register with compila you pay annually and one domain name is included in the price.  I think you can choose to pay monthly but on such low cost hosting there is little point.

.com is more because that is the price set by the company that manages them.  supply and demand probably has somehting to do with it.

for domain search tools , read my first post
yes the tools suggest different domains and variations on the supplied string.

companies tend to buy up domain names that a similar to theirs to protect their brand.  Can you imagine if Sony didn't own sony.co.uk and someone else bought it? carnage!

A good example is iplayer.co.uk (not bbc iplayer!)

And it gives you sort of a gui cms to update content as you please?

Making the website is upto you.  Compila Cpanel has something called fantastico that allows you to run an automated installer for various cms's i.e. Wordpress

Thanks

So just to clairfy, if you needed to change content on one of your pages and the site was hosted by whichever company, how can you do it?

A dot co.uk domain and hosting for one year, regardless of how many sub pages are on the website is only £14.00, the number of sub pages doesnt matter?

And is that the only cost you need to consider, price of hosting and price of domain - per year, if we develop it ourselves that is?

if you make the site yourself you use an ftp client such as filezilla, or winscp.

if you use a cms like wordpress then you just login into the site using a web browser

starter package £14.00 + vat gives you 500MB space which is enough for hundreds of pages but no databases.

For a cms you need a database so I would go for bargain package.

1000MB space, 2 databases, £21.99 + vat / year

I develop sites as part of my work so I can tell you that if you want a site developed for you it can range from a couple of hundred pounds to thousands for large / complex / bespoke sites.  Sounds like you would come under the hundreds of pounds category.

Thanks so much for the advice

Seems remarkably cheap for a years hosting, how do the hosting companies make any serious money is say the average per site is £20 per year?

will the performance of the website on these cheap deals be poor?

Someone who is purchasing hosting for £20 is only going to have a website with a low daily visitor count.  Thus an isp can have one server with hundreds of sites on it without any risk of overloading the server.  Of course if every site on that server suddenly had thousands of visitors in a day the server would crash.

If you have a high demand site then you will be paying much more for virtual private servers, or dedicated servers.  Going a set further i.e. wikipedia, they will have dozens of servers running in a load balancing configuration so that the demand is split between several servers rather than just one machine.  They spend millions each each on hosting.

You see it is all relative.  If you suddenly start getting thousands of visitors every day and start having a negative impact on the other users of the same server, your hosting company will contact you and tell you that you need to upgrade to a higher package.

no problem with performance with Compila.

See:

www.scm-uk.com
http://www.voltnet.co.uk
www.raundstemperanceband.co.uk

All these sites are running on Compila hosting accounts