- If you wish to establish a site, this means that you require a domain. A domain name is an easy-to-remember name that you type in your web browser’s location bar when you would like to see a specific website. Why Do You Require a Domain Name?
- This is a topic I introduce because of the fact that this past week my boss proposed the idea of developing a site for our brand new venture. That it is not a problem, the problem is that he needs a site, but does not know yet what it should look like, what it should include, and so on. All that he revealed to me was the name of the site – its domain name. So, we now have an Internet address for a yet-to-be-set-up site and nothing aside from that. The Domain Name
- Each website is located on a physical server. That physical server has its own physical address, popular also as an IP address. Accessing a website by typing the IP address of the machine in your web browser, though, is not the best and most convenient thing to do, so that was how and why domains came into existence. Thus, a domain pertains to an IP on the Internet. After it has been registered, that is. Registering a Domain Name
- To register a domain, you first have to settle on a domain name registrar. Linux Web Hosting has an optimal solution for my current and future projects – they offer a Domain Manager plan, which can be effortlessly upgraded to a web hosting package at a later time – when my boss finally determines what function the website will have.
- Hence, to register a domain, you need to choose a name for your website. Then, you have to pick a TLD – this is what comes after the dot. For example, in ‘sourceforge.com’, ‘.com’ is the top-level domain name (TLD). Obviously, ‘.com’ stands for ‘company’, ‘.net’ stands for ‘network’, ‘.org’ stands for ‘organization’, and so on and so forth.
- After you’ve chosen your domain name and your future domain name registrar, you need to confirm whether the domain name you wish to register is available for registration, since somebody else might have grabbed it before you, no matter how unpleasant it might be. Each domain registrar company, including Lonex, has a search tool at their sign-up page, which verifies the availability of a specific domain. To proceed with the registration of a domain name, you have to specify certain domain registrant information – the personal name, the physical address, the email and the phone number of the registrant of the domain name. You’ve registered a Domain… Now What?
- I registered .com, .net, .org and .edu domains for our project, according to the desire of my still-uncertain-about-the-purpose-of-the-future-site boss. I tested the domain administration tool Linux is offering and found it extremely useful – everything is coherently ordered and, from what I saw in the web hosting CP demo at their website, once we upgrade to a budget hosting package, it will stay the same, but with many more functionalities. This, thank heavens, will spare me quite a lot of inconvenience from having to manage my domain and website hosting user account separately. So, while waiting for the boss to make a decision about at least what the site should comprise, I was pleased to find that the domain name administration dashboard contains DNS management and domain renewal options, and – a very handy functionality (!) – a parked domain name template, which I used in order to set up a “Coming Soon” page for our domain names. Country-Code Top-Level Domain Names
- I was rather pleased to discover that Linux is offering numerous country-code TLDs since the project the website is meant for is international. Country-specific top-level domain names are delegated to local registry operators, which permit domain registration suppliers to register domain names, usually at rates that are cheaper than those offered to the end clients. There are many country-code Top-Level Domains: .co.uk for the United Kingdom, .de for Germany, .es for Spain, .us for the USA, .ca for Canada, .com.au for Australia, and so on. This, I am convinced, will please my boss because we will be able to build a local version of the website for each country where the project will be presented.
