nocturnalhostin
New member
One of the things that many hosting providers do today is setup a DBA as opposed to an actual corpoartion. There are many reasons for this, such as the high cost of corporations and the legal/accounting issues invovled.
To be honest, as the owner/ceo of a corporation, I don't find it that difficult to maintain all of the legal requirements - just more tedious and time consuming that anything else.
Rather than hiring an attorney, we used the services of MyCorporation.com (again, we have an affiliate program with them, and I'm not posting the link ;-). MyCorporation.com is MUCH cheaper than having a laywer file the paper work for you an they do a great job.
The only thing that they did not do was getting our corporation listed with Dunns and Bower(sp/name?) - which is a must for corpoartions [I felt kind of stupid that I didn't know this and only found out about it when applying for an SSL certificate].
The main advantages to a corporation over a DBA are that you (as the owner) aren't personaly accountable (meaning that if we were to get sued, that my car is stying my car). Another advantage is that it looks more "trustworthy" and professional to prospective customers.
The other important thing is to get your business name registered as a trade mark. Legally this isn't required because you have a defacto trade mark on your business name just by forming the corpoartion - but for knoweldgable customers it is nice for them to be able to see the nice little R next to the name...
Of course, the main problem with only doing a DBA is that with all of the webhosts out there that dissapear or provide poor service - almost all of them are DBAs (or not even a licensed DBA which is scarry). So, as customers become more and more knoweldgable - they are going to start looking for "incorporated" or "corporation" - once corporations (well, smaller ones) flood the market - thats when customers will start researching things like the dunns numbers and even digging through corporate documents (which are public knoweldge - such as financal reports, etc) to make their choice in a provder.
I guess many of us should be thankful that customer's havent started doing that - but with the numebr of here today gone tommarow hosting providers, I honestly belive that its only a matter of time.
To be honest, as the owner/ceo of a corporation, I don't find it that difficult to maintain all of the legal requirements - just more tedious and time consuming that anything else.
Rather than hiring an attorney, we used the services of MyCorporation.com (again, we have an affiliate program with them, and I'm not posting the link ;-). MyCorporation.com is MUCH cheaper than having a laywer file the paper work for you an they do a great job.
The only thing that they did not do was getting our corporation listed with Dunns and Bower(sp/name?) - which is a must for corpoartions [I felt kind of stupid that I didn't know this and only found out about it when applying for an SSL certificate].
The main advantages to a corporation over a DBA are that you (as the owner) aren't personaly accountable (meaning that if we were to get sued, that my car is stying my car). Another advantage is that it looks more "trustworthy" and professional to prospective customers.
The other important thing is to get your business name registered as a trade mark. Legally this isn't required because you have a defacto trade mark on your business name just by forming the corpoartion - but for knoweldgable customers it is nice for them to be able to see the nice little R next to the name...
Of course, the main problem with only doing a DBA is that with all of the webhosts out there that dissapear or provide poor service - almost all of them are DBAs (or not even a licensed DBA which is scarry). So, as customers become more and more knoweldgable - they are going to start looking for "incorporated" or "corporation" - once corporations (well, smaller ones) flood the market - thats when customers will start researching things like the dunns numbers and even digging through corporate documents (which are public knoweldge - such as financal reports, etc) to make their choice in a provder.
I guess many of us should be thankful that customer's havent started doing that - but with the numebr of here today gone tommarow hosting providers, I honestly belive that its only a matter of time.
