Lets say you come up with a web-page name and check to see that this domain name is unique - then how do you go about owning the webpage with that name? It seems many companies offer lots of different "deals" some of them remarkably expensive for just a made-up name like tootllydoodly.com and all of them seem to have an expiration date??!?!?

If you want to buy just the domain name it's cheap.

The company providing you with the domain name will have a section on its website allowing you to redirect requests for that address to another website address. So ifyou have a free website, you can point to that.


What they are charging extra money for is when you want to host your website with them. Plus promotional services perhaps.

I use LCN. I don't know if thats good or bad, but it's cheap.

Thanks :)

How long can you "own" the domain name? I mean, if you just want to own the www.XYZ.com name - who do you buy just that from?

You purchase it in years, i.e., you can buy it for a year or you can pay for ten years in advance and have that domain for 10 years.
You can always renew the term, but if you don't renew, somebody else will be able to buy it.

I use www.godaddy.com , lots of crap adverts, but good service.

You never actually 'Own' a domain name, it's merely leased. All you lease is the Alphanumeric (and/or hyphened) Canonical name. This name can be interchangeable in regards to which server IP address it points to via it's DNS entry. (Search 'DNS "IN A" ' for more information)

As Avatar mentions they are usually leased yearly, although some domains will be leased for two years and further still you can go for 10 year periods. What ever company (Registrar) you go with for handling your domain name you want to try and maintain a small amount of versatility, for instance the ability to point to your own DNS server or MX (mail) gateway obviously allows you to expand with a minimum of fuss, otherwise if you intend to extend your website to include your own servers in the future you'd have to move to a new Registrar which in turn costs administration fees and usually means having to re-register your chosen domain at the loss of outstanding time-to-expire. (extra costs)

When you register a domain name it will require Contact details to be submitted to a Whois record. This is so people can track people down who are in control of that domain should the need arise. The problem with such records is they can be publically viewable and their are various cowboy companies that are willing to take advantage of that. (I had a letter set to me once expression how my domain name was going to expire soon and that I should pay £120 to re-register, the con itself was if re-registered it would be with a different company that would charge an extortionate mark-up to keep the domain name. Most companies however run with a kind of 'Lock' where if you don't 'Unlock' the domain name, the domain will never expire as long as you keep paying the renewal fee. Such locks are to stop people just sneaking on days after expiry and stealing the domain name from under you.)

You can fill different Contact/Administration details in and in certain TLD (Top Level Domain) Schema's there is the option to OPT-Out in regards to having your information publically viewable. It is possible with some providers to provide bogus details, however the hope is they won't stop that as it's good for stopping spam and should the need for anyone requiring legal information occur to such a site, the provider itself has the real details at their fingertips.

[i.e. Whois for Stryderunknown.co.uk (http://webwhois.nic.uk/cgi-bin/whois.cgi?query=stryderunknown.co.uk) ]

Usually with domains it's best to have at the very least one 'Abuse@*' (* being the domain) email address as this is what Anti-spam legislators attempt to use when addressing a site on receiving unsolicited emails.

It can be handy to have a 'Webmaster@*' email address too, since Content management systems and custom built websites alike sometimes need report functions should their be any site failures. If you intend to run a company it would be a good idea not to just palm the Webmaster account on someone who makes the website, but attempt to forward a copy of the mail sent to the webmaster account to an address created for them otherwise they might cut you out of the loop on your own website (Some people have been known to hijack websites in protest of not being paid, however the part of the story that doesn't usually get told is the amount paid and whether they fulfilled the objectives set forwards by their contractor etc).

Try your best not to use "Generic Catch-all Email accounts" which can be possible with some companies packages. This is where emails sent to anything@* (where anything is literally anything) will be caught in one account, the problem with those setup's however is spammer create automatically created email addresses and that account will suffer heavy spam, so it's best to allow emails to 'Bounce' should they attempt to be sent to an invalid account rather than 'Captured' to be identified as existing.

Wow thanks!
I had no idea it was so difficult. Hmmm.... I'm going to have to learn a lot more about this.

OK I looked at the godaddy site, how many other sites are there? Many? Is there a site that ranks those sites?

Godaddy is one of the biggest domain registrars on the net, that's why I chose it.
Besides it has good tools for domain configuration.

http://namecheap.com

You know, I always avoid companies that have the name "cheap" in them. :D
Of course I don't know anything about the particular company you mentioned, so it might as well be very good.