How to Buy a Domain Name |
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| by Oscar Sodani | |
| December 23, 2005 | |
 Oscar Sodani is a founder of Help2Go and owner of Help2Go Networks, an IT consulting firm in the Washington D.C. area. Oscar holds the CISSP certification as well as industry certifications from Microsoft, Cisco and Novell. ESPN.com, Yahoo.com, Google.com -- these things are everywhere! We at Help2Go own help2go.com and a few more. I personally own sodani.com (my last name). How can you get your own domain name on the Internet, even if you don't plan on using it? In this article, you'll learn about:
What's Left? About 10 years ago, a young college student named Oscar Sodani (me) decided that he wanted to buy oscar.com. The Internet was just starting to get popular, and I decided that I wanted my own domain name. The cost then was $100, which was steep for a poor college student. So I decided to wait a couple of months and save the money up. Two months later, with $100 saved in my bank account, I got on the 'net to buy my beloved oscar.com. And -- the Academy Awards! The Academy bought oscar.com, snatched it away from me. They also bought oscar.org, oscars.com, and oscars.org. I was crushed. How about Osc.com? Taken. Osc.org? The Orlando Science Center. When I found Sodani.com available, I grabbed it as quickly as I could type. Believe me -- I learned my lesson. Never again would I hesitate to buy a name. That's the moral here: if you find a name you like, buy it right away. If you wait, you'll likely lose it to someone else. The game has changed. When we first wrote this article, there was only one place you could register your site: Network Solutions. They charged $35 per year for the registration, and you were forced to register for at least two years. $70 is no small price to get started with your own name. To add insult to injury, Network Solutions' contract stated that THEY owned the name, not you. You were merely licensing it, which meant that they could take it away at any time. But fortunately, the monopoly has been broken. Over the past few years, a myriad of new companies have gained the right to sell domain names. The competition has driven prices way down, and consumer rights way up. My current favorite registrar are NameCheap.com and Register.com. Register.com is a big company that fought long and hard for the right to sell domains. Now, they have a professional, customer service driven web site that gets you started with a domain name very quickly. Just visit their site and type in the name you want, i.e. myname and check the boxes for whether you want a .com, .org, or .net and finally click on the Check It button. Register.com will then tell you which of these (if any) are available and let you register it right there and then. The down side is that Register.com currently charges $35 per year, although you only have to register it for one year. It is pricier because the customer support is exceptional. Recently, I switched to another registrar, NameCheap. You can register names for only $8.88, and it comes with WHOIS protection (so that spammers can't look up your name and email address from the domain registration records! You only have to register for one year, and the registration process is very simple. I've heard nothing but good things about this registrar, and we've transferred all of our domains to them. $9 / year is an amazing bargain! What's in a name? Most of the "normal" names are now taken. Most single words or common phrases with a .com suffix have been already bought. Your best bet is to go with a two or three word compound or phrase. Or a jumble of letters that serve as an acronym. If you are really lucky, your last name will be available, like mine was. Or if not, maybe your full name. You do not have to buy a .com name, either. If myname.com is taken, go ahead and try myname.org, or myname.net. The .org and Net suffixes are becoming a lot more popular as the .com name space is beginning to dry up. How to Get One There are two ways to secure a domain name. The first is to get it directly through the registrar of your choice (i.e. NameCheap), and the second is to secure the domain name through a web hosting agency. We'll examine both of these in depth: On NameCheap's web site, simply type in the name you want and check whether you want .com, .net, .org, or others. NameCheap will tell you if the domain you typed is available, and if not, they will suggest similar ones that are available. You will then have to fill in a registration form with your name, address, etc. You will also need to create a userID and password for the NameCheap site. At this point, you will be asked for DNS servers -- leave this as the default so that NameCheap's DNS servers will be entered. Later on, you can change these servers to reflect the web hosting company you have chosen to house your web pages. Or the web hosting company can even do this for you! NameCheap provides you with the basics, including several e-mail accounts you can forward to your own e-mail address. That way, you can own an e-mail address using your brand new domain name (i.e. oscar@sodani.com) and all mail sent there is automatically forwarded to your current e-mail address. Plus, it can also automatically forward web site visitors to your registered domain to another URL. For instance, we have www.sodani.net set up so that it automatically forwards your web browser to www.sodani.com instead. The second option is to secure the domain through a web hosting service. Web hosters are ISPs that let you "rent out" space on their servers for you to post your web pages. They put your domain name entries in their DNS servers, and point those entries to the space you rented. You have to pay a fee to the web hoster every month, usually $5-$20, but that is MUCH cheaper than trying to set up you own servers on the Internet. Exponentially cheaper. When I first started registering domains, I used an hosting company called 1 & 1 to do the work for me. They have plans for beginners starting at just $3/month. Parking a Site Name There is a third option, if you are interested in reserving a name, but you don't need a web site right now. It's called parking, and it's free, except for the yearly fees you pay to your registrar. It works like this: you arrange to buy the name through a web hosting service, and the web hosting service places the domain name entries in their DNS servers. They then set up a single web page, that you can edit, saying that this domain is taken. In most cases, you can only type text in these parked pages, so images or special HTML is allowed. Your domain name is now reserved. If you ever need to use it, you can call your web hoster and either purchase a hosting plan from them or move it to another web hosting service. The web hosters are glad to provide this service, because they know that you will likely become their customer if and when you do decide to activate the site. And in most cases, you do not have to pay anything to the web hoster while your site is parked! NameCheap provides this service, as do Register.com and 1 & 1. Squatting Squatting is illegal, and so we highly recommend that you not even consider it. Squatting is when you buy a name that you know to be a trademark of another company. Then you try to sell that name to that company for exorbitant amounts of money, or maybe you use it for yourself so people accidentally visit your site. Corporations don't mind suing people who try to steal a trademark, a fact many squatters have found out the hard way. Besides, the authority that decides who owns a domain name almost always rules in favor of the corporations, even if the little guy has a good case for owning a domain. For instance, a celebrated case was when a man bought mcdonalds.com before the restaurant company could purchase it. This guy then held out for a lot of money, trying to put the squeeze on the corporation. Of course, he eventually lost it, as the registrars came up with policies against that sort of behavior. Other people are squatting on names that are similar to well known sites, like anazom.com (instead of amazon.com). Unfortunately, some of these are "adult" sites, so please be careful of what you type in the URL field of your browser. A typo can send you to the most awkward of sites. If you find that someone is squatting on your copyrighted name, do not hesitate to file a complaint with the registrar. At the very least, they can temporarily shut down the site until the dispute is settled. Instructions for disputes are explained on their web site. Good luck! I hope you fare better than I did when looking for a domain name you like. If you know of someone who'd like to buy a domain name, send them this article. As for me, I'll never forgive those Academy Awards people... Have a question? Need help? Get free, friendly person-to-person help with your computer questions or spyware questions in our help forums! |
