Domain Name Registration
February 24, 2009 by David
Filed under Domains & Websites, Featured Articles
Before you can even get started with a website you’ll need to go through the process of registering a domain name. If you’ve never registered a domain name, you’ll realize that there is not one set company to use for domain registration. There are a number of internet providers offering domain-name registration and each company has their own set prices. The domain regsistration cost can range from as low as about $8, all the way up to as much as $35 per domain name registered, per year.
When you are first getting started with domain registration, you’ll also find that many of the names you would like to register are already taken. This name shortage can be indeed frustrating, but due to the internet being around for over 15 years, the vast majority of dictionary-based internet domain names are already registered.
The most popular domain name extensions are:
.com: This is the original and most popular domain name extension. By default most people expect websites to end with .com, so you should always do your best to register a .com domain extension, especially since dot-com will get more so called “typein” traffic from folks typing-in the words they are looking for (without spaces) in front of the dot, followed by the extension which will frequently be .com. With that said, our website traffic research indicates dot-org is second in typein popularity behind dot-com.
.net: Most people consider this domain name extension to be the second best among domain name extensions. If you are unable to secure a .com with your chosen name, then you can go for a .net or .org, and consider other extensions such as .biz or country-code domains including .us (United States).
.org: This domain extension was initially setup for non-profit organizations but may now be used successfully by for-profit business too. The dot-org extension carries with it a nicely perceived degree of trust and a non-commercial connotation
.info: This domain extension is for “information” type websites and is usually the lowest price of all extensions
.biz: The idea behind .biz was its potential use by businesses based on the biz-business connection. Dot-biz recently appears to be getting more popular.
Some other domain name extensions are .me .tv .name along with many country specific domain name extensions including the very popuar .de (Germany), .ca (Canada) and co.uk (United Kingdom). When conducting your domain name research you’ll able to search for your name and you’ll be provided the results of if the domain name is available with your chosen extension. If not available, you are usually given the option to view if any other extensions are available for the selected name.
A simple search for “Domain Registration Providers” using Google will provide you with a list of companies to choose from for your domain registration needs.
For many folks, newer domain owners and small business I believe GoDaddy is a top-choice for domain registrations and web-hosting too, of particular value is their always excellent technical support, which tech support can be a negative issue with some registration firms.
Once you buy a domain name it may take some time to arrange for web-hosting and get your new website design completed. It seems that invariably the entire process consumes much more time than at first believed possible.
There is a good way to possibly get some income from your domain(s) as you wait to get the websites online. It’s called “domain parking” where a content and marketing provider supplies you with a free web-page with targeted ads.
We highly recommend parked.com where you can park your domains at no cost and perhaps receive some pay-per-click income, which is payable to you twice-monthly (instead of just once a month as offered by other parking firms) and can be paid by PayPal.
You will find the parked.com web-pages very sharp looking and easy customization (even your own custom content) can easily be added to the parked web-page.
Doing some work with one of our websites an-ebook.com we realized how ’stupid’ we were in the past by using the hyphenated version of the name ‘An Ebook’ for the developed web site when we also owned the non-hyphenated name at the same time.
Not sure why we ended-up developing the domain with the dash between words but it could have been because many years ago (before the search-engines word-parsing technology became so good) it was widely believed the hyphen would seperate the words for the benefit of the search engines, and thus you would be ranked better.
That is believed to be no longer correct so a dumb decision we made to save the small domain renewal fee and let the domain without the dash expire was a real bad move.
That is especially true since after the domain expired it was picked-up on the drop by a competitor who now has a nice website running under that domain-name. Since hyphenated domains often get less traffic vs the same name without a dash we would not at all be surprised if the competitor who now owns our old expired domain is receiving more internet-traffic than we are
thanks to that dumb mistake.