Registering a Domain Name

If you're reading this article, you're most likely either taking the first steps in learning the tools of the trade towards becoming a webmaster, or you're just trying to sure up your company's name on the web before it's taken. Either way, this is the first step towards a professional looking home on the web!

What is a domain name and why should you register one?

A domain name is the URL or address of your website. For instance, the domain name for this site is learnstuffonline.com. Through various options with our server, we also have the ability to setup subdomains for this website such as webmaster.learnstuffonline.com or hometheater.learnstuffonline.com.

Here are a couple of reasons why you would want to register your own domain name instead of paying or letting someone else do it for you:

• To secure your place on the web.
• To gain the ability to have custom e-mail.
• To ultimately have complete control of your domain.

Securing your place

If you have control over your domain name, you have control of everything that falls within it. If this seems overly obvious to you, maybe you have never considered having a company setup or host your website. Often when they do this, they will offer to register a domain name for you (either for free or not) and that will be the name of your site. (i.e. www.yoursite.com) So what happens when you get fed up with their services and decide to leave in favor of someone else? Quite often, you'll come to the stark realization that you don't own your website’s name! They do. So if you want that name back, you'll have to pay for it.

Custom e-mail

Are you tired of being stuck with some e-mail consisting of a bunch of numbers after the name you wanted because that name was already in use? Like poohbear192@aol.com? Well when you have your own domain name, you get to have whatever e-mail you want! PLUS, your site's name will be reflected in your e-mail address! So if you register a domain name of 100acrewoods.com, you can have pooh@100acrewoods.com as your e-mail address!! Pretty cool huh?

Complete control

That's what we're really talking about here. By registering a domain name yourself and learning about all that goes into it, you'll be the one at the reins of the operation. (And that's what you really want anyway right?) It's easy enough, it's cheap enough, so why not go ahead and do it?

Continue on to read how you go about actually getting your domain name -
By contacting a Domain Registrar!

1, Page 2 (Let's Register Already!)

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