Many web hosting companies offer a free domain name when you purchase a hosting plan.

Unfortunately, these are usually only free for the first year. After that, you have to renew at a fee set by the hosting company — usually several dollars a year more expensive than if you were to pay for it separately directly from a domain name registrar.

Hosting companies also have a tendency to add-on additional charges like domain name privacy, which you can also get cheaper (or for free) from many good registrars.

If you’d rather purchase your domain name separate from your hosting plan (which is a very good idea), check out our list of domain name registrars for some of the better low-cost options.

Just about every domain name registrar will be able to sell you a .com domain name.

No, there are many other options.

For example — if you are a non-profit organization, a club, a church, or another non-commercial entity, you may want to register as a .org domain name.

There has been a trend among tech-focused startups and open source projects in the last few years to use the .io extension.

For non-US entities, each country has its own country-code TLD, such a .uk and .ru. These are also popular for domain hacks — using the domain extension as part of the name of your site or brand.

There also, of course, the new “exotic” domain names, such as .ninja and .club. There are a number of these, and they might fit your brand very well.

You generally want to steer clear of second-tier gTLDs such a .biz and .info. These are not very well respected and tend to make savvy internet users suspicious.

A domain name registrar is a company that manages the registration of domain names. When you buy a new domain name, you are buying it “from” a registrar (that is — you are paying the registration fee to a registrar).

Any good domain name registrar will let you search for domain names.

Namecheap has a particularly good domain name search tool. It lets you search hundreds of domain name options based on provided keywords, including domain names with the new Top Level Domains.

Whoishostingthis.com is the best place to look up information about a domain name. Just go to the search form on our homepage and enter the domain name. From there you can see where the website is hosted and what its IP address is, and you can even get the site’s WHOIS information.

Shared Hosting is a regular low-cost web hosting solution suitable for the vast majority of personal and small business web sites, and is provided under our Solo and Startup plans. For those customers with demanding or high traffic sites, or for those looking to host a web site with faster speeds, Dedicated Hosting is recommended – these are all the plans with “Dedicated” in the title. These plans include more resources (up to 5 CPU Cores & 8GB RAM) and also include caching technology to make sites incredibly fast, with LiteSpeed server-side page cache.

We’d recommend our Dedicated hosting plans for e-commerce stores, high traffic sites, or for those customers who want to leverage our server side caching technology so that their site loads as fast as possible.

Yes. We provide fast support 24x7x365.

Yes, your hosting comes packed with the world’s number one control panel, cPanel. You can read more about cPanel here.

Yes! Our primary hosting facility is based in Tampa, FL. We also have a secondary facility just north of London in the UK. Either facility delivers fantastic speeds globally, however for best performance we’d recommend that during checkout you choose the facility closest to the majority of your visitors. You can also enable a free CloudFlare CDN from your control panel which will serve up static content such as images from over 100 global locations serving every continent, speeding up service to your visitors wherever they are.

Yes you can upgrade at any time. If you are upgrading from Shared Hosting to Business Hosting we will need to migrate your account to a different server and will arrange a convenient time to do this for you with minimal downtime.

Accounts will be set up immediately after payment. You should receive a welcome email with instructions on getting started within a few minutes after making your payment.

We offer extremely competitive pricing on domain names that is often much cheaper than at other registrars. If you prefer, you can still host with Kualo and keep your domains at any registrar you choose.

Yes. All our plans come with an unlimited number of parked or alias domains.

We take an automatic backup on a daily basis for all accounts. Customers on our Startup and Performance plans can restore files directly from these backups via your control panel, as well as initiate on-demand snapshots of their account.

The automated backups we take are strictly speaking for the purposes of full server restoration, and as per our terms, we do not guarantee the availability of these backups.

You can pay monthly or for 1, 2 or 3 years up front. If you decide to pre-pay, we give you some great discounts on our ongoing pricing. A one year prepayment gives you 2 free months, a 2 year prepayment gives you 6 free months and a 3 year prepayment gives you a whole year free!

Extremely. You can see an overview of the security measures we have in place that keep our web hosting incredibly secure.