5. HOW TO CHOOSE A DOMAIN NAME AND HOSTING COMPANY FOR YOUR BULK SMS BUSINESS. DON’T MAKE MY MISTAKES
A domain name is the website address of your bulk SMS business. An example is sms.com.ng. That’s my own domain name. Choosing a domain name and a reliable web hosting company can be most times tough when you don’t have enough information.
You want to choose a domain name that’s short and easy to remember and at the same time meaningful to the scope of your business. I guess you love my own domain name, sms.com.ng, right? It is short; easy to remember; and meaningful to the scope of my business, bulk SMS.
You need to take out time to decide and find the best domain name for your own bulk SMS business. Please, in the case you can add the words ‘SMS or bulksms’ to it, please do. That will help you on Google rankings because it has the keyword for your business. People are searching for the keyword ‘Bulk SMS Nigeria’ and this is why I also created another bulk SMS website, BulkSMSNigeria.ng to gain some targeted traffic.
Your domain name can be a .com, .com.ng or .ng. Please, don’t use any other domain extension as they are not common to the users.
A hosting company is a company that hosts your website’s files on their servers, such that when your website address is visited, your website files will be loaded from your hosting company’s servers.
I’m sorry to say this because I’m a Nigerian, but please, don’t ever use any Nigerian hosting company for your bulk SMS business. When I said anyone, I mean it. Don’t use any Nigerian hosting company for your bulk SMS business to avoid being doomed. I know 90% of all hosting companies in Nigeria, and I must tell you that they are trying but not enough for your money business.
When I first started this journey, I used a Nigerian hosting company. They frustrated my life that I almost gave up. In this minute my website is loading, in the next 5 minutes, it’s no longer loading. Then the most painful part of it is that when you contact them, it will take them 2 days to reply to you. Now, their replies will be like “We are sorry about this, we are looking at it.” Come on, what the heck?
If that was the only problem, then we could still manage, but no, I woke up one day only to notice that my website is nowhere to be found. When I contacted the hosting company, they apologized and said that their server was attacked and all the websites on that particular server were deleted erroneously. Everyone’s site was gone. No backup; nothing at all. My journey on that particular website ended abruptly.
Then I moved to another Nigerian hosting company. After 1 month, their servers too were attacked and my 3 websites got vanished. This story is long and old now, but you can still cry for me though. This didn’t happen only to me, but my friend too. He lost 5 websites with a particular Nigerian hosting company due to ‘attacks’ on their servers.
My brothers and sisters, as an upcoming entrepreneur, I want to recommend to you Namecheap. Namecheap is the hosting company I later found a home with. They are foreign and one of the bests in the world. They have the cheapest hosting plans in the world and yet very reliable. They will give you free SSL which is very easy to install. Their least hosting plan which currently goes for $15.44 for the first year and $30.88 subsequently will allow you to host 3 websites without shaking. They have the best customer support in this world. If you ever face any issue, just chat with them on their website and your issues will be resolved in less than 10 minutes. They will even still be there begging you to help you with any other thing. Forget it, they are super.
Disclaimer: I’m not affiliated to Namecheap. I’m only giving a personal review because I use and love them.
6. HOW TO CREATE YOUR BULK SMS WEBSITE THE RIGHT WAY, STEP BY STEP WITH NO STEP SKIPPED – YOU DON’T NEED TO HAVE A PRIOR KNOWLEDGE OF PROGRAMMING
Truly, gone are the days when creating your own business website requires you to be a badass programmer or have lots of money to pay a developer. These days, there are tons of content management systems (CMS) that enables you to easily create your business website in some hours without having any knowledge of programming. We have the CMSs like WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and many others. Among these, WordPress is arguably the most popular and easiest to use, but in the course of this our journey, we will be using Joomla to create our bulk SMS website.
You can create a new Joomla website or easily convert an already existing one to a full-fledged bulk SMS platform just by installing a component that I will show you below.
There are many bulk SMS portal creator components and scripts available in the market and I want us to discuss four of the most popular choices before we continue.
4 BULK SMS PORTAL CREATORS AND SCRIPTS
• SMS Portal Creator – SPC (Joomla Component)
• Jeema SMS (Joomla Component)
• Ultimate SMS (PHP Script)
• Sendroid Ultimate (PHP Script)
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