Chapter 4 - Domain Registration

Domains are a very important topic in web design. In this chapter I will go over what domains and subdomains are, and how to register your own domain.

Domains

Domain registration is an important topic in web design. A domain is a www.your-domain.com. A domain name consists of letters and numbers and the “-” . It has to start and end with a letter or a number. The “-” cannot be used at the beginning or end. The domain name must contain at least one letter, or it could be confused with an IP-address. The third and fourth characters cannot be a hyphen (“-”). Domain names are NOT case-sensitive, and can be from 3-63 characters long. When you have a domain name, you can host your site under that name, and host your e-mail under that name too. For example, your e-mail address can be myname@mydomain.com . Make sure your host has an e-mail service.

Suffixes

“.com” is not the only suffix you can have. There are many others. The top level suffixes are .com, .net, and .org. Here are some other suffixes you can use:

.com
.net
.org
.us
.info
.biz
.ws
.name

Remember, these are for the U.S. If you live outside of the U.S., there will be different suffixes.

Subdomains

Subdomains replace the “www” in domain names. For example, a subdomain would be look like “site1.your-domain.com”. A subdomain can be made up of the same characters as a domain name. Subdomains represent different directories in your domain. The beauty of this is that instead of having to make separate folders for each one of your sites, you just make some subdomains. This is very useful if you are going to host different sites on the same host. Sometimes when you sign up for a free host, they will give you a subdomain of their web site, such as zimmerdesigns.netfirms.com.

Registering Your Domain

To register a domain, first you have to find a registrar. You will then purchase your domain there. Domains can range in price form $9 to $35. The site I use and recommend is Godaddy . I have listed some others for your convenience on my web page. Once you have purchased your domain, you have to link it to your host. To do this, you have to change the domain pointer. You host will tell you what to change them to, but usually they are ns1.your-domain.com and ns2.your-domain.com. Once you have changed this information with your registrar, you will have to wait 24-48 hours for this to propagate. Then you have your domain!. The next step is uploading your site to your new host.

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