Buying your own Domain Name
Domain Registration
Treat Your Site to a domain one can remember!
It can be a real drag trying to remember your web page’s full address, especially if it is something like members.aol.com/Mywebsite/index.htm or www.myspace.com/mywebspace/index.htm. Wouldn’t it be more convinient to have something a bit more obvious or even a bit more interesting such as www.YourDomain.com? People would find it much easier to remember which would help increase traffic to your site. Buying your own domain name and getting your site to appear at that address isn’t as hard or expensive as you’d think.
Buying the Domain
First of all, you need to buy a domain name. The cost of this has dropped dramatically recently and you can now get a .com, .net or .org address for $8.95 a year or a .biz or .info address for $5.99 a year. Depending on the suffix i.e. .us or .com etc, you generally have to rent a domain name for a minimum of two years. Some domains such as .name only require a one year minimum. After that you need to remember to renew it or risk someone else getting it if it is a particularly good one. Alot of times you will have the option to have it set to automatically renew when you buy the domain.
Typically, when you buy a domain name, the company you go through will provide a few ‘free’ features to go along with this. For example, GoDaddy.com currently offers a Quick Blog, Free Hosting with Web, site builder, Complete Email, Starter WebPage, "For Sale" Page, Free Parked Page, Getting Started Guide, Domain Forwarding & Masking, 100-Pack Email Forwarding, Total DNS Control, Change of Registration, Status Alerts and Domain Locking.
It is worth noting that the most of the domain names that are even somewhat memorable have already been snatched up so you may have to be a bit creative when choosing a name that hasn’t already been taken, However, some untouched names still do exist. You can easily check this at the time you order as most firms have the facility to search for your chosen address to see if it already exists.
Making Your Site Appear at your New Address
Just owning the domain name isn’t much use in itself. As noted above, buying a domain name also brings with it web forwarding. This means that when someone types in ‘www.unspoken-cheese-dishes.com', they will be taken to your chosen web site address either on AOL or elsewhere. This sounds great but you should be aware that as soon as they click on a link to a sub page, their browser would no longer show www.unspoken-cheese-dishes.com but change to the real address such as members.aol.com/mike1234/cheese. To get page addresses like www.unspoken-cheese-dishes.com/cheddar/index.htm you’d really need to investigate having your web hosted by the same firm that looks after your domain name. To be honest, once someone has got as far as your web site, the actual address that shows in their browser is neither here nor there unless your web site is being used for professional purposes.
Email Extras
What happens if someone emails ‘information@unspoken-cheese-dishes.com’? With email forwarding, you can arrange to have any emails with that address automatically forwarded to your normal email account(s). You could set up a range of addresses under the unspoken-cheese-dishes.com domain and have them forward to different email addresses you already use. Typical master address for a site would be admin@unspoken-cheese-dishes.com.
What about if someone either mistypes an address or guesses an address such as delicious@unspoken-cheese-dishes.com? Using the so called ‘catch all’ option you can either have any non specified addresses sent to a particular address or you can have them sent back to the sender with a message advising that no such address exists. Not bad for about $3 a year!
It is now inexpensive to have your own authentic domain name. It is also extremely easy to configure it to forward your email to nominated addresses allowing you to create a far more memorable presence on the web. There are plenty of companies out there offering such services and the added features are getting better and better.
Pointing the Domain to Your WebSpace
Setting the DNS Server Names on your Registered Domain
Now this is the part most people do not want to deal with but in reality it sounds alot harder than it actually is. Honestly, setting the DNS Name Servers is fairly easy. First, what you need to do is go to the site you get your webhosting through. There you can either contact technical support by either phone or a service ticket system. What you need to do is ask them for the DNS Name Servers. They will either give you 2 names like for example:
Name Servers: (Last Update 10/1/2006)
PARK29.SECURESERVER.NET
PARK30.SECURESERVER.NET
or they will give you 2 IP addresses. For example:
123.321.1.8
123.321.1.9
the Reason for 2 is that if one should become unavailable you will always have a backup. Now once you have this information what you need to do is go to the site you got your domain at. Usually you build an account on that site so you will need to log into the account. Once you are in you can go to the properties of your domain by either clicking on your domain located on the page or following a link on there that says something similiar to Domain Control Center. When you get to the properties of your domain you should see a place to enter atleast two DNS Name Servers. There may already be 2 names in there and that's fine. Those where put in there by the company you got your domain name through. They are temporary names which you no longer need. Go ahead and overwrite those with the name servers we acquired from our webhost and click save.
Why do we need to do this? When you edit the name servers in your domain record, you are telling the Internet which name server provides the most up-to-date directions. If you don't change the name servers in your domain record (let's say you use your old web host's DNS), then your web site will point to a server that isn't hosting your domain. Or, if the old web host deleted you from their DNS, your domain wouldn't work at all.
When you change web hosts (addresses) or register a domain for the first time, the new DNS information has to reach every other name server (DNS) on the Internet. Your site may work in as few as 4 hours, but the average waiting time is 24-72 hours. This delay occurs because most name servers (DNS) choose to periodically check for updates. That is, they aren't "live." Periodic checking is done because constant checking often slows down the server.
Now, all that's left for your domain to point to your website is to sit and wait.