Buying a Domain Name

What is a domain name?

Domain name in lay terms is the address of your virtual home. To ask someone to visit your home you must give him your home address. Same way if you want some one to visit your site (i.e. your web page) then you must give your domain name. Domain name is also referred to as hostname or web address.

A domain name is a name like http://www.yantrapark.com/ or http://www.yahoo.com/ or http://www.jokerspark.com/. The letter that follows the final dot is called a top-level domain (TLD) name e.g .com in above case. Commercial (.com) is the most common used TLD. It is also referred to as gTLD (generic top-level domain). Similarly there are many other TLD for e.g. .uk which refers that the site is related to United Kingdom, .us indicates that site is related to USA, Similarly .in for India. These are classified as country code top-level domain (ccTLD). Refer to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_domains for list of existing TLDs.


Why register a domain name?

First of all if you own company say ABC, then buying a domain name ABC.com gives you credibility. People would not like to type http://www.abc.com/ instead of www.geocities.com/abc which is available free.

If you get a domain name that describes your product or service, then it will be easy for people to remember it too.

Even though you don’t own a product or service, you still can purchase a domain name as your family name. This way all the relatives of your family can access emails like Bill@gates.com or Bill@clinton.com.

There are many more reasons for buying a domain. I used http://www.khushianchan.com/ to setup a blog of my niece. It is easy to maintain a blog with pictures and send the link address to all instead of sharing the pictures in email, isn’t it?

How and where to register a domain name?

Two points mentioned below are required before you start domain name hunting.

1) Think of few good names that you would like to buy. Just thinking of one domain is not enough as the chances are that it might have already been registered by someone.
2) Make sure that you have a credit card ready as most of the sites register using credit cards only. There are few sites which do register through your local bank too.

There are numerous domain name registrars. Listed below are few of which I have used and have not created any issues for me. If you register it somewhere else make sure that they register it with your name as owner, else they might just sell it again to someone else without your knowledge. You can also sell your domain names to others for profit..

The cost of domain registration is usually around USD 8 to 10, i.e. even less than $1 per month. So don’t loose time, as the domain name which you are interested might be sold to some one else.