Interested in getting your own domain name?
Confused where your domain name is because you registered it “free of charge” with your website hosting contract?
A word of advice – keep your domain name registration and website hosting service separated. You’re paying for it anyway, hidden, deferred or otherwise. Should your website hosting service go bankrupt or service issues arise you may find yourself writing and faxing lots of legal documents to claim your ownership.
Follow the step-by-step instruction for a methodical domain name registration and maintenance.
1. Research domain names(s)
This is the most crucial, difficult and time consuming part of the process. Your domain needs to match your company name or in case of a new entity you need to make sure that the chosen domain name can be registered with your local business license authority.
2. Select registrar
Depending on your country you need to select an ICANN accredited domain name registrar that offers a convenient administration panel.
Where larger registrars offer multiple registries (e.g. com, net, org, cn, com.cn, asia, eu etc.) some specific registries such as the Japanese co.jp registry requires the submission of a business license.
3. Check availability
Run your choices through the search/availability page.
3.a Not available
More often the case – go back to step 1. and get more creative.
3.b Available
If you are luck to find a suitable domain name proceed through the shopping cart process. If available, consider the purchase of the other or similar registry to eliminate any competitors moving in on your success. Note: don’t forget to register the corresponding name on social media services such as Twitter and services such as Skype for branding purposes.
At this point you are likely confusingly persuaded to purchase a number or other related services, disregard them, any supplement service can be added at a later point. One recommended addition to the registration is the privacy registration (if available) as it protects your private information being published to the public.
4. Open an account
Proceed through the domain name registration process and provide your name and postal mail address. If in doubt, duplicate the same information to the administrative and technical contact section.
5. Registration Details
Most important at this stage is that you provide an unrelated domain email address. Should an unforeseen problem arise, you wouldn’t be able to be contacted at the address you’re have a problem with. Always use an alternative email address like Google or Yahoo account.
6. Payment
Make a credit card payment. It is convenient and often cheaper to make one single payment for many years, if you choose to do so, make extra sure that your information up-to-date as there are often many changes one forgets over the ears. See step 8. for details
7. Safeguard registration
Keep your domain registration information (paper printout recommended in case of hard disk failure) with your other important information. Note your domain name, registrar URL, login name and password.
8. Changes
Any business or personal change may have an influence on the ownership of the domain name and requires an update.
8.a. No
Your domain name registrar contacts you periodically to remind you to update your account. In case you haven’t received any such notice it’s time to research the why.
8.b. Yes
Credit card expiration, theft of credit card, ownership or partnership change, bankruptcy, business / address move, phone number change, email address change or a divorce etc. requires an update to keep your domain name secure.
9. Update registrar
Login with your registrar (with saved information from step 7), update and manage your account information accordingly.
If you think of the above process as complicated you will find yourself startled in case you need to prove ownership of a domain name.
Attack is the best defense.
