The Dreaded Free Email Address

I’m sure we’ve all seen this… an impressive brand new looking car or van drives by with their branding and advertising on the side… details of what they do, contact details and that awful hotmail.com email address (or any other free one for that matter).

Within a split second any professional image you had built up in your mind about their company is destroyed and now all you can picture of some guy invoicing you for 6 hours work for a job that should have taken just 1 and being overcharged for inferior products. All that because they opted to use a free email account rather than paying a few pounds a year to have their own domain name.

With the cost of domain names these days there is no need to bring down the impression of your company by using free email account and even getting a basic web page developed doesn’t cost a fortune.

With domain name registrations available from only a few pounds and website design services available from companies like UK2, UKHost4u and Namesco, getting a basic, informative website and a good company image is more affordable than you may realise!

To make choosing your domain and hosting provider a bit easier I have created a list of some of the popular domain and hosting providers and you can find this listed below. If there is a provider you is not listed here but you feel it should be then please let me know!

My advice would be to visit each site to see what they can offer you as UKHost4u is currently offering a free domain name if you pay for the whole year in one go rather than paying monthly, but UK2 is offering a discount on hosting if you pay 2 years in one go. By spending a little time shopping around you could find a deal which would save you a good few extra pounds.

It may also be worth noting that you do not have to stick with the same company for both the domain and the hosting so you can mix and match i.e. purchase your domain from UK2 and your hosting from UKHost4u but please bear in mind that the website builder is dependant on who you choose for your hosting service.

Please note that all prices are stated per year and some companies may include VAT on top of these prices.

Tags: free email, free email account, gmail email, hotmail email, yahoo email

This entry was posted on Friday, June 20th, 2008 at 11:57 am and is filed under Self-Employment, Starting a Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.