---
title: "How to setup your own online business - The Geek's guide"
url: "https://osherove.com/blog/2006/7/24/how-to-setup-your-own-online-business-the-geeks-guide.md"
canonical: "https://osherove.com/blog/2006/7/24/how-to-setup-your-own-online-business-the-geeks-guide.html"
published: "2006-07-24T09:44:00"
updated: "2006-07-24T09:44:00"
tags: []
author: "Roy Osherove"
description: "Every once in a while I come across someone who asks me various technical stuff about my business like how I manage my email, where do I host my site etc. So I wrote up a short article that might help future readers…"
usage: "Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page)."
license: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
---

# How to setup your own online business - The Geek's guide

By Roy Osherove July 24, 2006

**Historical article** · Originally published July 24, 2006; technical details may be outdated.

Every once in a while I come across someone who asks me various technical stuff about my business like how I manage my email, where do I host my site etc. So I wrote up a short article that might help future readers with the same questions.

[First Technical Steps to create your own business](https://osherove.com/rosherove/pages/FirstStepsToYourOwnBusiness.aspx)

Here are some points I answer there: 

- Don't leave before you have  a business card
- How do I get a domain?
- Should I get a ".com" domain or one for my own country?
- How do I manage my domain(s)?
- Web hosting
- I want to use Exchange for my emails
- I don't want to use Exchange, and I don't want to pay for a "real" email.
- I want to have a "catch all" email address
- I want to build a website


---

## About the author

**Roy Osherove**: Senior Solutions Architect at AWS working on AI for production and AI-driven development; author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership, with about 20 years of consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery.

### Sites

- [RobotPaper](https://robotpaper.ai/): This blog: AI patterns and anti-patterns, AI and coding agents, and engineering leadership.
- [osherove.com](https://osherove.com): Roy's personal site. Author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership; consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery, plus about 20 years of blog posts.
- [The Art of Unit Testing](https://www.artofunittesting.com): The Art of Unit Testing, 3rd Edition (Manning): readable, maintainable, trustworthy unit tests, plus TDD workshops in C#, JavaScript, Java and Kotlin.
- [5whys.com](https://www.5whys.com): Roy's writing on software team leadership: self-organizing teams, surviving chaos, learning mode and the Elastic Leadership model.
- [Pipeline Driven](https://pipelinedriven.org): Continuous delivery and DevOps practices: build patterns, pipeline-friendly testing, DevOps metrics and enterprise DevOps.
- [Elastic Leadership](https://www.elasticleadership.com): Elastic Leadership, Roy's framework for software team leaders (survival, learning and self-organizing modes).

### Social

- X: https://x.com/royosherove
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/osherove/

### Contact

- Contact form: https://forms.gle/jQSx5KoXvrVA1JCK7

### License

Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page). License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/