Justin Gable

On the path to claiming your own piece of hyperspace real estate, purchasing a domain name is a good place to start. If you want to learn what a domain name is and get some tips for buying one, keep reading, but if your itching to blow some money click here to skip to the spendin’ part.

Examples

• www.ebay.com
• www.google.com
• www.justingable.com

Purpose

In the simplest explanation possible; a domain name represents a specific place (directory) somewhere in the vast network of computer servers, what we web professionals like to call the “internet”, with an easily memorable name. If we didn’t have them we’d have to remember web addresses such as http://74.125.19.147/ if we ever wanted to visit Google.

Dot Whatever

Those little letters that appear at the end of a domain after the “.” (com, net, org) are called Top-Level Domains (TLD). Each one has it’s own reason for existance; the 3 most common are:

• com: (Commercial) officially intended to designate commercial entities
• org: (Organization) mostly associated with churches, charities and other non-profits
• net: (Network) intended to be used only for the computers of network providers

Of course anyone can buy a domain name with either of these extensions, and these “rules” I listed are generally not followed. When buying your own domain, however, get a .com if at all possible, it’s the one that most people will assume is your TLD when entering in your address.

What’s in a name?

• it must contain 3 to 63 characters
• it can contain the letters a-z as well as numbers 0-9
• it can contain a hyphen (-) but it cannot start or end with one
• it cannot contain spaces or any other special characters

Where to buy

There are many places that will sell you domain names, some will try and entice you with $1 domains or even free… DO NOT FALL FOR THIS! Usually they want you to sign up for their hosting service before they “give you” the domain name of your choice. But wait there’s more! That domain you were just “given”, you don’t own it, the people you bought it through do. So, when you go to change hosts for whatever reason, they will most likely not give you the domain name back.

It is best to buy through a 3^rd party and there are two that I recommend, GoDaddy (you know, the ones that run all the ads during the Super Bowl with the skanky women) and NetworkSolutions. Both offer nice controls to manage all your domain names and have excellent customer service. GoDaddy is who I use and they’re the ones I’m going to walk you through buying your own domain name.

The Walk-thru

 
Buying a domain name on Godaddy.com from Justin Gable

Wrapping up and looking ahead

Hopefully I’ve helped clear the air around getting your own domain name. However, if there is something you feel I left out or something I went over needs some more elaboration, leave me a comment.

In the next tutorial I’m going to show you how to purchase your own hosting and setup your domain name to point to your shiny new server space.