Do-It-Yourself Guide to Domain Name Registration

If you have your own internet domain name, it makes a big difference to the appearance of professionalism and permanence of the company.

If your e-mail address is something like name@bigpond.com or worse still, name@hotmail.com, it can make your company seem fly-by-night or disorganized. Also, not having your product or service information on a website is missing out on a cheap and easy marketing opportunity.

This guide will tell you how to register a domain name and set up your own website and e-mail for that address. If you would like help to do some or any of this, please contact me.

Setting up a domain name is not that expensive. You need to pay a recurring cost for two things – the domain name registration and a web-host to provide a server to receive your e-mails and store your website files (from $50 per year).

Check to see if the domain name you want is registered.

Check www.checkdomain.com to see if the name you want is registered and if so, who has it.

Register your Domain Name

This means that the name you chose is registered to you for a certain length of time (1-10 years) and no-one else can use it as long as you keep paying the re-registration fees.

If you are going to set up your website and e-mail address in the next month or 2 the easiest way is to get your web-host to do all the registration for you (see Website Hosting below)

If you are not going to set up your website immediately you can just register the domain name without actually being able to use it.

.com names cost from US$12.95 for one year (depending who you use to register - I currently recommend www.mydotnames.net who charge US$12.95 per year.

.com.au names cost from $25 for 2 years (www.australianwebsites.com)

Website Hosting

Your web-host provides a server to receive your e-mails and store your website files and distribute them to internet users who want to view them 24 hours per day.

See sidebar discussion of how to choose a web-host.

Within 48 hours of paying your money, you can start using your new e-mail address and start putting your product, service and contact information on your web-site. And when you have your own domain name you can make up as many e-mail addresses as you like. Suddenly your one-woman-band can have e-mail addresses like sales@.., marketing@..., info@... And you can receive them all or designate them to your staff as you like.

Designing Your Website

Websites can be simple or complex, professionally designed and maintained or maintained in-house. It is up to you and your budget. Don't let your experience (or lack of it) worry you. Twenty years ago you didn't know how to write a Word document or send an e-mail - but you don't think twice about doing that yourself now.

If you can write a word document, you can learn to write a web-page. However, if you use a graphic designer, your web-pages can look a lot more professional. I think a good compromise is to ask a graphic designer to do a sample page or two to provide you with an easy to use template including recommended colors, fonts and layout which you can then fill in, edit and change as you wish, as often as you want without further charge.

For editing web-pages, I usually recommend Microsoft FrontPage ($320) or Dreamweaver ($600) to design and update your website. This software has a similar look and feel to Microsoft Word so most people can learn to use it fairly quickly. But I’d recommend you have a lesson or 2 first. See Training

(The above information is adapted from an article originally written for the Hong Kong Women Business Owners' Club newsletter - April 2003. Updated with Australian content May 2005)

Reference: How does the Domain Name System work?

Whenever you use your internet browser and type in an address, your request is sent to your nearest DNS (Domain name service) server. Every domain name is associated with an IP address which consists of 4 numbers below 255 separated by dots. This IP address is the address of the server which is hosting the website.

For example my domain name www.hkcrystal.com is located at 67.15.45.20. I use iinet.net.au to connect to the internet and their DNS server (and every other DNS server around the world) has the information that www.hkcrystal.com is at 67.15.45.20. With this IP address the internet can route your request to the server with this IP address and read my website located there. Every DNS server keeps a long list of IP addresses to match the name to or if it doesn't have the address itself it can send the request to another DNS server which will have it.

If you register your domain name without having a web-host the name is just reserved for you but no number is listed in the domain name servers so no-one can get to your website and if you try you will see an error message.

When you sign up with a web-host, they will assign an IP address for your website. If they also register your domain-name they will make sure all the settings are correct.

If you previously registered a domain name but didn't have a web-host then or you are moving from one web-host to another, you may need to login to the site where you registered you name and change the Name Server (NS) settings to point to the IP address that your web-host has given you.