Domain Registration
What are Domain Names?
A domain name is your address on the Internet. It’s your brand.
In reality a domain name identifies an IP address under your domain name, being able to change that IP address, whilst keeping the domain name, by changing the hosting server using the Domain Name System (DNS).
Let’s study first the parts of a domain to know what is all about. There are two main parts:
- Top Level Domains
http://www.exampledomain.com
Taken the above domain as example, the Top Level Domain would be .com
When registering your domain name you’ll have to choose which top level domain you want. For business purposes a .com is the most commonly used option.
The most common used are the generic ones as .biz, .com, .info, .name, .net, .org and, the country specific as .us, .fr, .ca, .es, .ar, .it … (some countries like UK use also .co.uk)
There are others called sponsored as .coop, .edu, .gov, .int, .aero, .asia, .cat … and others like .ws, .tv, .me …
- Second Level Domains
This will be the name you’ll choose. In the above example it would be exampledomain
HTTP means Hyper Text Transfer Protocol.
HTTPS means Hyper Text Transfer Protocol Secure
WWW means World wide Web
How to choose a Domain Name?
You must pick up the most relevant name as possible according with your website activity. If your site is about software it would be great to pick software.com (if it was available). If you talk about pets, it will be non sense to call your website usedcars.com.
Try to be as much concise as possible to help search engines to find you and so, the people who is looking for the info you’re giving.
You can also brand yourself using your name, an alias, a new product, a new company…
You can also be generic if you want to build a big site. Imagine you want to talk about illnesses and you register illnessesinfo.com. You could then create a bunch of subdomains and/or directories about different illnesses, causes, consecuences, treatements, etc, and narrowing down to the specific topic.
if the domain you like is already taken, you can try to use hyphens, plurals, words like “the”, “my” and see if they are available. You can also use a smart resource like http://www.domaintools.com/. Click on suggestions, type your desired domain name and then click on “search”. It will come up with 20 suggestions closely related and will show you if they are available or not.
How and Where to Register a Domain Name
The way to register a domain name is almost equal with any domain registrar. Once you land on the main site of the registrar you’ll find a blank box where you must type the domain name you wish to have. If the domain is alredy taken, it will give you some suggestions on available domains related to the one you entered before. Pick up one of them if you like it or type another name and repeat the process until you find one available -or use http://www.domaintools.com/ to choose your domain name-.
There are lots of good registrars and it would be impossible to say which one is the best, but as we use NameCheap, this is the one we recommend.
They offer very good prices and free Whois Guard Protection the first year:
