Website domain Registration

Lounge
#1

I’ve been asked several times if I have a website to showcase my work. However, I have no clue about the costs involved and how to go about.
So, please guide me about the cost to register a website domain name? Also, please share ideas of the maintenance of the same?

#2

Here’s a basic introduction - please feel free to ask if you need more.

There are three parts to what you want to do:

  1. Register your domain name - easy, cheap

  2. Find somewhere to host your website (the files, images, documents text that make up your web pages

  3. Make sure your domain name point to the hosted website

  4. Registering your domain name

There are many organisations that will register your domain for you. Your ISP may provide that service (that’s who registered my domains). If not, or you’d prefer not to have everything managed by one company, there are companies that specialise in this. GoDaddy (www.godaddy.com) is a popular choice; I’ve used them for certificates (see below) and I found them OK.

Registering a domain is quite cheap - around $10-£50 per year - and there are often deals to be had.

If you go to a registrar site, they usually have a query screen where you can enter your preferred domain name and they’ll tell you whether it’s available (if someone else has already registered it, it won’t be available). It gets a little bit messy here. The last part of a domain name (for example, .com. .co.uk, .org ) is know as the top level domain (TLD) and there are many of them - each country has a set of TLDs (I’m in the UK and we have, for example, .co.uk, .or.uk, .ac.uk and so on) and there are generic TLDs (.biz, .info and so on). Your preferred domain name might be available with some TLDs and not others. You want a TLD that reflects you and your site… Some TLDs (like.com) cost more to register than others)

  1. Hosting

You need somewhere for the site content. People like GoDaddy offer hosting services, as do many others, together with software to help you build your site. You can also look at alternatives to creating a site from scratch, such as:

  • Wordpress - started as a blogging site, but you can put together some nice looking sites for free
  • Tumblr - a bit similar to Wordpress, but (in my view) not as serious

There are specialist services for, for example photographers: Flickr is free (but its future is uncertain); SmugMug has free level as do others.

  1. Point your domain at your site

Any of the hosting providers will have a simple way of allowing you to do this. I use SmugMug for photos, and my photography domain name just point to the SmugMug site

Hope that helps to get you started

#5