So, you are contemplating your very first website.  Congratulations, but there are some things that you should know before you begin.  First, if you plan on hiring someone to design and publish your website, do not let your webmaster purchase your domain name for you.  You need to be listed as the owner of the site.  This will prevent problems when you want to move website hosts or change webmasters, including maintaining your site yourself.  If someone else is the owner of your domain, you will be at their mercy when you want to make a hosting change.  The owner could tell you that you need to purchase your own domain name from them and the price could be high, depending upon the quality of the site name.  The more wanted, popular or common the name, the higher the price could be.  This is not an ethical practice, in my opinion, but it is very common.  There are companies out there that make their living just by reselling domain names.

Begin searching for the availability of your perfect website name.  Move forward very carefully here.  There are sites that you can go to for checking if the desired website name is available, but be careful that the one you use is not a “domain name reseller”.  Some domain name resellers will monitor searches on their site and then, either reserve or purchase the names that you searched for.  Now, if you have been poking around just to see what is available and come back to a domain name registrar, you may find that your perfect domain name is no longer available.  The best way to search for available domain names is to perform a Google search.  If the domain name entered results in a “PAGE CAN NOT BE DISPLAYED, SERVER NOT FOUND” message, then, you are 90% assured that the name is available.

Another safe way to search for available domain names is to go directly to WHOIS.  Whois.net is a is a query/response protocol that is widely used for querying databases in order to determine the registrant or assignee of Internet resources, such as a domain name.  (See the full description of WHOIS here at Wikipedia.)

1and1.com is a very affordable web hosting service and domain name registrar that you can use after you have decided upon your perfect website name.

If you are kicking yourself right now because you realize that when you got your website up and running, you instructed your webmaster to make the url purchase and registration, you are not doomed.  The webmaster can login to the registrar and change the ownership to you.  There is no charge for this from the registrar, but your webmaster may or may not ask for a fee or inform you that you need to buy the name from him or her.

Here are instructions and process flows for transferring your domain name to another provider.

Tags: domain name, hosting company, registrar, url, webmaster, website, website host

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 29th, 2009 at 9:27 am and is filed under Internet Tools & Tricks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.