Register Your Domain Name

I have said it before and will say it again, Register Your Domain Name for Yourself and Your Business. It is not very expensive and so important. If you are starting a new business, make sure that you .com domain name is available. Register your name (www.firstnamelastname.com). Register your kid's names. They will appreciate it so in the future. Register these domain names even if you do not plan on having a website right away.

How much does it cost? Well, the service that I use cost less than ten bucks to start and less than ten bucks a year to maintain the name. With that you not only get to register the name, but have access to a simple web interface to forward the domain. Here is how it works. Say that you register www.yourcompany.com, but you actually website where you are posting the site is www.homepage.earthlink.net/yourcompany/. Well that last URL is not so professional, not exactly something that you want to put on you business. You essentially point the browser from the first URL, which is easy for your customer to remember, to the second URL where you get cheap or free web hosting.

Obviously, as your business grows you may need to find a more formal web host. But this will get you started. By the way, the company I use is called www.975Register.com (I am not getting paid to send you to their site.). You can see if the domain name is available on their website and register it for $9.75 per year. They also allow e-mail forwarding. You can have an e-mail address like customerservice@yourcompany.com and forward it to you personal e-mail account. You can have up to 50 separate e-mail addresses with this particular company.

(Update 12/23/05: www.GoDaddy.com is now cheaper than 975Register.com. www.GoDaddy.com is now only $8.99 with more features than others.) If you have several domain names to register you might want to look at www.GoDaddy.com . They are just a bit more expensive than 975Register.com at $9.20 per year, but they will try to sell you many, many other products and services. Some of these might be interesting to you if you are looking for some help with submitting your website to search engines. But you have to pay extra for e-mail (now free) from www.GoDaddy.com . And I think that going to Google and submitting your website for free is good enough for most domain names.

One more important item. Because it is so cheap you may want to register the .org and .net addresses for you company. I would not worry about it for my name, but in business it is important. Also you may want to register a common misspellings of your business name too. You can again point it to your real e-mail address. For example, say that you have a country club called MillionairesPardise.com, you might also want to register MillionaireParadise.com (without the s in millionaire). There are companies that look for and exploit these common mistakes in URL formatting for popular websites.