How to Register Your Domain Name

by Archy

Choose Your Domain Name

Before you go ahead with registering your domain name, first choose your domain name. Think about some names that you feel fit for your business or individual needs. Your domain name must be able to represent you in a good manner. You can use a dictionary to try mixing up some names to come up with a good domain name. It's good to have easy to remember short domain names for your business needs and it's good to have cool and spicy domain names for your own individual needs.

Check for Availability of Your Domain Name

From the days the internet was launched to today, millions of people have registered millions of domain names. A lot of the common work domain names have already been registered and are currently under use by some business or individuals. All the domain registration websites allow you to search for already registered domain names. You can search if the domain name you need is available or currently under use.

If the domain name is under use, you can make an offer to the domain name owner or use a different domain name. You can have alphabets, numericals in your domain name. You can have a slash (-) as well but no extra special characters are allowed within a domain name other than this. A domain name holds a prefix that is the www (World Wide Web) part and then the actual domain name and then an extension. All these are separated by a dot. There are several extensions to choose from.

People normally register their domain name with a .com extension. However if your domain has got something to do with your company, you can get a .co extension as well.

Register Domain Name Online

There are thousands of companies that allow you to easily register the domain name of your choice online. The process for registering a domain name generally involves searching for availability of the domain name, registering a domain name and finally paying and confirmation of the transaction. You can either pay online or simply visit the company's office to pay for the domain name registration. The most popular domain name registering websites are Register.com and NetworkSolutions.com.

You can choose from a number of domain name service providers. Some domain name service providers also provide quality value added services to their clients. These include free URL (Uniform Resource Locator) re-director service, e-mail forwarding and managed DNS (Domain Name Server) for your domain name. You can look for various domain name registering websites from any search engines as well. Normally a domain name is priced between $6 to $10, depending upon the various services and extensions.

Managing Your Domain Name

Domain name registrars provide you with a Domain Control Panel, once you purchase a domain name from their company.You can easily manage your domain name from that online console. Basically you can add a domain name, search for a domain name or change the current domain name hosting company. You can also transfer your domain name from one company to another, in case you feel that the service of your current domain name registrar is not upto the mark.