You will want to set up a website for your new company based on your name. There are a lot of different domain types out there, but for simplicity reasons we all went for the “.com” domain name. For us this meant we needed to have the FiveWhyz.com domain.
To set this up you need an Internet Service Provide (ISP). FiveWhyz folks have used:
No matter which you choose, the process is pretty much the same - you key in the name to see if it is still available, you request that domain, hand over a credit card to secure the name, and then you have it. With that, you have secured the domain name for a period of time, typically 1 to 3 years (depending on how much you have paid). The cost to register a domain (at the time of writing) will be around $20-$50 depending on the ISP and the features you select.
Now if you actually go to that website, you will find… well nothing. That's because you haven’t built the website. Most of the time you will want that website to be hosted. What this means is that you will load files onto the ISP server that will be the content of your website. More on that later. Hosting is an additional cost to the domain registration and if it hasn’t been set up as a result of the domain registration process, is usually controlled through a “manage domain” type panel on the ISP’s website. The cost of hosting is all over the board, so start simple and add more if you need it. If you do this the cost (at the time of writing) is around $120 - $200 per year.
In addition, hosted sites usually offer some form of email server. Typically, you will want to set up your email so that people can connect with you and you usually will want your business email to be separate from your personal email. For us, this meant setting up email mailboxes with names like info@FiveWhyz.com or hans@focussedagile.com. Most ISPs offer some form of Web based access to this email, but you will usually also want to access this through a standard email client. Again the ISPs will have instructions on how to set up email client access to your new email mailbox.
By Way of Context ...
You are looking at a part of a series of blog posts. The series looks like:
If you are interested in more information about choosing domain names and how they work I found the Ultimate Guide to Choosing a Domain Name to be useful.
And remember, I am not an accountant. I am not a lawyer. You will want to get help from these experts and should defer to their opinion in the event that what you read on this page differs from their opinion.