How to Register a Domain For Your Cheap Or FREE Website
How to Register a Domain For Your Cheap Or FREE Website
The first step towards getting your business or personal site running is getting your own space on the web, which starts with getting your own domain name. If you want your own personal domain you have to pay a yearly fee but it doesn't have to cost much, and there are even free alternatives that are almost as good.A domain name or site name is a unique text URL that references your site and only your site. Google.com and How2buildyourwebsite.com are examples of domain names. The authority that domains must be registered with is the "Internet Corporation For Assigned Names And Numbers Authority"or the ICANN which is the agency that oversees the allocation of domains on the web.
A regular person cannot directly register a domain name with the ICANN because that would be to easy. To get your site online you need to go through a licensed domain registrar. These registrar sites charge a yearly rate which can run between five to twenty dollars per year.
Some licensed domain registers also offer web hosting. Web hosting services offer the online storage space you need for your files. Your domain doesn't need to be registered with the same company that provides your web hosting; in fact, web hosting companies usually gouge you on the price for the added convenience of using one company.
One of the cheapest domain registrars online is Namecheap who's prices average at about 8.88 per year which is less than three quarters a month. If your interested Namecheap also recently started offering web hosting as well but this is not their specialty. I have used Namecheap personally for over a dozen different domain names and have never had any problems with their customer service.
The real question is what can you get for free? Well depending on what your looking for it turns out you might be able to get everything you need for no cost at all. There are a number of sites online such as CO.CC that offer a free sub domain of their site. What this means is that your domain is actually a part of their domain and the URL will reflect that.
A sub domain does give the overall domain a little control over your domain name, you are dependent on their existence and continued service online. They do not force any advertisements on your site. They do somewhat limit the overall amount of bandwidth traffic, and disc space you can have. The most important sacrifice is that your domain name itself has to be a subset of theirs. In other words you cannot have mydomainname.com but rather if you register with the site CO.CC your site would have to be named mydomainname.co.cc but if replacing the typical.com or.net extension with the extension of .CO.CC doesn't bother you, then one of these free alternatives might be just what you need.
How to Register a Domain Name For Your Tech Blog
The first step in starting your tech blog is deciding on the domain name -the name of the site. Behind every website is an IP address and thanks to the Domain Name System (DNS) we can easily type in a web address such as yahoo.com instead of referring to 209.131.36.159. To see this in action open the command prompt on your Windows Machine by clicking the Start Button -> Run ->cmd.exe and then type ping yahoo.com. Think of DNS as the phonebook for the Internet - rather than making calls using 10-digit numbers you use your Contact List which references those phone numbers for convenience.Now that we have a basic understanding of what a domain means it's time to decide on the name for your tech blog. Web developers will argue at great lengths over the importance of picking the proper domain name, but I believe a good starting ground is using Google Trends. By looking at Google Trends you will be able to get a basic idea on the volume of searches for your niche. Let's face it most of us will not be able to develop a tech blog like Engadget or Gizmodo by ourselves nor will we have the time to pump out dozens of articles a day to rival their post volume. In the event that you are focused on creating the next Engadget or Gizmodo I'll tell you that you will need a team of writers because one area that all successful blogs agree on is the importance of valuable content. Producing content for the sake of post volume is one of the biggest mistakes first-time bloggers will make, I myself was a victim of this when I first launched my own blog.
So what should I name my tech blog? Well for starters put yourself in the shoes of someone trying to gain information on your niche. What type of content is under served? For example if I was looking to create a tech blog focused on laptops I would start with considering my personal expertise on the subject. Say for instance I had a heavy background in tech support and hardware upgrades for Laptops. My niche should be focused on the types of Laptops I have experience with which in this case is Windows-based laptops. Since my knowledge is focused on repair and support the domain I would choose would involve the following terms: windows, laptop, repair, support, upgrades, Microsoft, Vista, XP, Windows 7. By searching these terms in Google Trends I would decide based on which terms generate the largest search volume.
Now that I have decided on a domain name there are a couple options for registration. Since I'm an advocate of shared hosting when starting a tech blog I would take advantage of the free domain name included in a shared hosting package from Bluehost. This is not your only option - you can register your domain name with any service you'd like regardless of where your tech blog is hosted. If you choose to take this route I still recommend using a centralized location rather than spreading your domains across GoDaddy, 1&1, Register or any of the other domain registration websites on the Internet. Within each of the control panels of the respective sites I've listed are domain settings which you can alter to point the domain at your website using the DNS info from your web host. Let me explain how this works:
Let's say you found a good deal on registering a domain on GoDaddy, but you wanted to use Bluehost for your web space. You register your domain with GoDaddy and then sign up for a shared hosting package with Bluehost. In order for the GoDaddy domain to point to your Bluehost web space you'd need to make some changes. First, within the GoDaddy control panel you would need to edit the domain to point to the Bluehost DNS settings: NS1.BLUEHOST.COM and NS2.BLUEHOST.COM. Next you would need to add the domain within your Bluehost cpanel and finally you will need to wait up to 48 hours for the DNS to update. The good news with domain names is that you can transfer a domain you register after 60 days of creation. If you later decide that you want to keep your domain registered with the same company hosting your web space, you are free to do so without any sort of fee. For a first-time tech blogger it makes sense to take advantage of the free domain included with most hosting packages.
