Do you need a your own domain name?

That depends on your needs.

If you are only interested to publish a few personel pages then the most inexpensive way would be use the storage generally provided by your Internet Service Proivider for you to publish your personal web pages or you can also publish your blog for free at blogger.com
The disadvantage of this inexpensive approach is that your site’s address will carry the service provider’s domain name. If your account were abthomas@isp.com, your web page address would look something like: http://www.isp.com/~abthomas. For most people, that address is not easy to remember.
There are a number of good reasons for having a domain name and just to name a few:

• If you are serious about have a presence in the Internet, then a easily recognizable name would be a asset. The visitors simply type your domain name and they would be brought to your site.
• A domain name gives you credibility.
• You can get a domain name that describes your company’s business or name, people can remember the name easily and can return to your site without having to consult their documents.
• You can get a good name that describe your product or service, you might even get people who were trying their luck by typing “www.product.com” in their browser.
• You can retain the same domain name even if you move away from your current service provider and your visitors can still access your website using the original domain name they came to know you by.

What is a domain name?

In technical terms:
A domain name is text name corresponding to the numeric IP address of a computer on the Internet and it must be unique.
In layman terms:
A domain name is a unique name that identifies a web site.

Can anyone register for a domain name?

Anyone can register for a domain name. You can own more than one domain name. You don’t even need a web hosting to register for a domain name. Many domain registration company provide free domain parking service. You simply register your domain name and they will park it there until you want to assign it to a web hosting account or redirect it.

Please note that domain name registration is on a yearly basis. You need to renew your registration yearly or register for a number of years at one go if you want to keep the domain name for many years. If you don’t renew then your domain name expire, others have a right to register or take the expired domain name you once owned. If you are are interested to keep the domain name, you must monitor and renew it.

How to get your domain name?

To get your domain name you need to register your domain name. You can goto any of many domain name registration company. Prices range for $3.99 to $15.00 or even more. You can see that there is wide differences in price. I don’t how good are the very expensive ones but in my opinion a domain name registrar is just a simple service.

To get your domain name, go to any domain name registration company web page, choose your domain name, check if your chosen domain name is available, if not try other names. Once your chosen domain name is confirmed available, you will fill your particulars, pay for it and your chosen domain registered and owned by you. If you want, you can try out the two companies mentioned further down for your domain registration needs.

What is private registration?

Normally information about the owner of a domain name is recorded in the WHOIS database. So anyone can see your private information using that database. For example, you can go to whois.net to lookup the whois database and check on any domain details.

However if you opt for private registration (usually paying an extra fee), the domain registration company insert their information to the WHOIS database instead of your private information. Therefore shielding your information from spammers and hackers.

For me I think it is better for individual to go for private registration so that your private data is not revealed to the public. However for a company you may not mind your data being made public.

What have I done?

I registered my domain at Godaddy.com. I purchased web hosting from them too so that I can take advantage of the offer of $1.99 for the domain name. One reason I chose them was because they were recommended to me when I attended an Internet Marketing seminar and also partly because they are #1 in domain registration.

Another more cost effective domain registration I’ve found.

For domain name registration, Godaddy.com fee is reasonable but they are not the cheapest around. If you are thinking of registering many domain names, then it might be a good idea to go for a more economical domain name registrar. iPower.com provides domain registration with whois privacy at only $6.50/year. The same thing at Godaddy.com would cost about $14/year. This a really good deal at iPower.com with savings of $7.50/year.