Wired Office » Small Business IT

How to buy a domain name in Australia

dburchall — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 03:42:01 +0000

To start a website for your small business you need to register a domain that is either directly matched to your registered business name or company name, or is associated with your business. The rules according to the registration authority in Australia are:

an exact match, acronym or abbreviation of your company, business, trading, association or statutory body name or words in your registered trade mark;
or be closely and substantially connected to you because the domain refers to a product you manufacture or sell or a service you provide.

Costs to register a new domain name vary widely and domain name registrars in Australia vary widely in their pricing. Melbourne IT is one of the oldest registrars and hosts and at the time of writing the cost to register a com.au domain is $140 for 2 years. Another domain registrar, Netregistry, is also a veteran in domain registration and their costs for a com.au domain is $49 for 2 years at the time of writing. Smartyhost is an Australian domain registrar and host owned now by MYOB. Their com.au registration cost is $19.98 for 2 years.

If you’re looking for cheap domain hosting there are pitfalls to look out for with some registrars such as additional monthly fees to park your domain, or, when you choose a host and need to divert the domain name servers to your new host you may be charged an ongoing fee.

If you are going to optimize your new website for search engines such as Google you should ensure your domain is hosted on servers on the Australian continent. Many aussie hosting providers simply buy space on a server in Texas for example and resell the space. To achieve good positions on Google in the future your domain extension and hosting server should be regional. Choose your host carefully, ensure they are not listed on blacklists. Some cheap hosting providers may be hosting your website on a server with the same IP address (non dedicated) as spammers or unscrupulous websites.

Many of our clients are hosted with Smartyhost and we give them a high score for technical support that is local and user friendly, good hosting prices and services, and reasonable domain name registration fees.

How to build a successful online business

dburchall — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 02:43:54 +0000

Winning Business Online Training links

Thinking about starting an online business? The Australian government has enlisted the Sunrise Show’s Koshi to present a series of tutorial modules called Winning Business Online.

The current government also intends to streamline the process of registering business names on a national level, rather than a state by state basis with separate fees being paid to each state government. This will make it easier for online business to protect their business name.

Another incentive for small business is the instant write off for assets up to $5000. This would be a good opportunity to buy your new computer or other equipment you need.

There’s more information about government incentives, tax breaks for smallbusiness and programs here.. We found government websites on these subjects to be outdated or hard to locate.

Sending large attachments that won’t get lost

dburchall — Sun, 30 May 2010 02:35:46 +0000

Send Large Attachments with Outlook 2007

The Bigpond limit for email attachments is around 10mb. Anything over this size might be stripped out by the receiving server so your recipient never sees the attachment. Because of binary data conversion in email programs an attachment can be bloated by up to ~30%, and the content of the HTML email also needs to be factored in to the overall size of the sent item.

Programs for sending attachments at http and ftp have been around for a long time, such as usendit and others. Acrobat now offer a free program for sending large attachments that integrates nicely into Office Outlook 2007. Once installed you have the options for sending attachments like you normally would, or via the Acrobat plugin. What we like about this offering from Acrobat is it’s free, and the brand name is familiar to most internet users.

Windows Home Server for small business file sharing & backups

dburchall — Thu, 27 May 2010 08:01:33 +0000

Small and micro business with 3 and up to 10 computers on the network, can avoid the costs associated with full server installations by using Windows Home Server for file sharing and automated backups.

Using a workgroup network often means backing up data from individual machines. This is a problematic way to backup data because backups are forgotten, or not backed up correctly causing problems when restoring from the backup.

Windows Home Server is a low cost solution (our Home Server with licences for 10 users is $1130 inc gst at time of writing) for small networks wanting the efficiency and centralised data storage of a server without the overheads of contract IT support services.

A quick guide to the new Intel Core i-series processors

dburchall — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 05:19:50 +0000

Would you buy a new computer with a 3.3GHz Core i5 processor, or a 2.66GHz Core i5 processor?

The choice seems obvious at first and I notice a lot of retailers subtly exploiting complexities of core models and steppings to sell cheaper computers. In the above example the 2.66GHz processor would be your best choice because it’s more powerful, offers greater multitasking capabilities with four cores instead of two cores in the 3.3GHz model.

You can download the whitepaper at our computers perth page in a jargon-free friendly format and get a heads up on buying a new PC.