Ok, now that you’ve settled on which name you’d like to use for your blog, you need to register it. Why? What does this mean?

Let’s take a step back here, let’s look at what a domain is in the first place. A domain is a name that identifies one or more IP addresses. Ok, so what are IP addresses you ask? IP addresses are like phone numbers, except that rather than pointing to a specific phone, they point to a specific computer. So for example, LearningCentre.com’s IP address is 207.58.160.157. This IP number is the address at which you can find the computer hosting LearningCentre.com. If you’re interested in how an IP address works, what the numbers represent, you can visit this link for more details (each section of number represents something else much like the area code part of a phone number represents which geographical area you’re trying to call to).

Alright, now that we understand what an IP address is, how is that related to a domain? The reality is that IP addresses are hard to remember, much like phone numbers. So wouldn’t it be much easier if we could just remember a string, a piece of text, like LearningCentre.com? Which is exactly why domain names where invented. So now when we type in LearningCentre.com in our browser, it automatically converts it to 207.58.160.157 for us behind the scenes. Too bad they don’t really do this with phone numbers too…

The next question is, how do they do this? How do they know that LearningCentre.com goes to that address and not another. And what if 100 people want that same name? This is where registrars come in. The first person to register a domain name gets it. You usually get it for a specific time period, the most common being one year, after which point you can renew it (you always have first rights!) If you don’t renew it, it goes back up in the free market for anyone else to buy.

So if you have a name, you need to register it with a registrar. This of course costs the registrars something, and so on. I won’t get into the details of the registrar business, but needless to say expect to pay a little bit of money. From my experience, you should be able to pay less than $10 per domain. Initially when the internet started there was NetworkSolutions.com and two other major players. A while back, the registrar business was opened up and now there are litterally thousands of registrars. So which do you choose? Honestly, I’ve used several and I’m pretty happy with GoDaddy.com. Every registrar has it’s issues, and their price is good (at the time of this writing a domain costs $8.95/year).

Assuming the domain is still free, you just go through the process of registering your domain and paying for it. Some registrar will try to upsell you, of which GoDaddy is probably the most famous for (I’ve yet to see as much upselling on any other site as GoDaddy), but you can generally just be happy with the domain and no other add-ons. The only upsell I can think of is to make the domain registrant information private, much like paying for a private phone listing. Otherwise I’ve never really seen any benefit to most of the other upsells.

As well, make sure that your contact information is correct. It’s possible that they’ll need to contact you. Some registrars might only try once. You need to keep this updated.

When you’re registering your domain, I generally suggest to people I know to auto-renew the domain. This means that when your time period expires, the registrar will automatically purchase the domain for another time period for you (generally 1 year). This is a nice feature because it helps to prevent you from losing domains just because you forgot to renew it. However the onus is now on you to cancel the auto-renew if you decide you don’t want to renew it. For me personally, I’m much more apt to forget to renew a domain than anything else, so I use this feature a lot!

Ok, now we’ve got our domain, how do we get it to point to our IP address? How do we get an IP address? That’s the answer to the next article in this series…