Domain Name Registration

Domain name registration is one of the most important decisions you'll make before creating your website. The choice of your domain name can help with the optimization of your webiste as the name you choose can help to inform the search engines about the subject and relevance of your site. Once you decide on one, you need to register the domain name.

All websites have an Internet address in the form of a domain name. Free websites usually limit you to a subdomain like jchandler.geocities.com where geocities is the domain and jchandler.geocities is the subdomain.

A fully registered domain name will cost you anywhere from six or seven dollars a year up to as much as $35 per year depending on the registrar. An example of a fully registered domain name would be

"www.create-a-great-website.com" or "www.guidesandtutorials.com"

Subdomain names are sometimes provided by free web hosting companies. Perhaps your Internet Service Provider (ISP) give you free web space for a web site, but it probably only includes a subdomain.

If you're simply building a personal web page for a hobby or family web site, a subdomain will work fine for you. But if you're serious about your website and you're using it for business or even more importantly, if you're creating a web site from which you're hoping to generate income, you really must own a fully registered domain name and you do that through domain name registration.

There are several reasons for this:

You may be need to go contract with a fee-based web hosting service because many free website providers cannot meet your site's needs. Most commercial web hosting providers will require a fully registered domain name.
You want people to easily remember your website address and usually subdomains are harder to remember.
The most important reason if you're building a business related website is because search engine rankings are the most important way to attract traffic to your website. Your choice of a domain name is an important step in getting ranked and getting traffic. Also if you're planning on using Google Adsense on your website, you must have a fully registered domain name.

What is the Domain Name Registration System

The Domain Name System (DNS) is a system to organize and route traffic to computers on the Internet. Every computer has a unique address called an IP address which is a complicated set of numbers. IP Address stands for Internet Protocol and are typically the numbers that represent a website address. If you type in the IP address for a Web server into the URL bar on your browser, you would get to the same website as if you typed in the domain name for that same server. The domain name is simply a device that makes an Internet address easier to remember.

Domain name registraion is the process of inserting an entry into a database of all of the domain names and their corresponding computers on the Internet.

Domain names end with typically a three letter extension such as .com, .net, .org, .biz, .edu, or .gov. They could also have longer extensions such as .name or .museum. Companies that register domain names are known as registrars.

When you purchase a domain name, you will provide the registrar with contact and technical information (name, company, address, etc.) about you and your website. Additional information including the domain name, the date that you purchased the name and the date will need to renew it are all recorded in the database.

The registrar submits that information to a central directory of domain names called the "registry." The central database is maintained by a company called InterNIC.

How Does the Domain Name Know Which Web Server to Send People?

Some of the technical details that are included with the domain name registrar is information about the name servers you will be using. Remember that a domain name is shorthand for an IP address. There has t be somewhere on the Internet where the association information between an IP address and a domain name is kept. That information is stored on a name server.

Each domain name record requires two name servers: a primary name server or DNS for short and a secondary name server.

Each name server is responsible for maintaining the information associated with certain domain names. There are thousands of these name servers scattered all over the Internet. When you enter a URL in the location bar of your Internet browser, your browser sends a request to the name servers which then point your browser to the correct IP address for the computer where the website for that domain name lives.

In its simplest form, that is how the domain name system works.

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