Obtaining a domain name
Audience: This report is useful if you have decided to do-it-yourself, directly registering your own domain. If you are using a web services agency like Walking Dolphins Consultancy the article will be only of interest.
There are several steps to complete to purchase your own domain name. You can do it yourself (DIY) if you the time and effort you will spend is worth less than the cost of having someone do it for you, or if you just have an interest in learning the procedure.
Our sponsor, Walking Dolphins Consultancy will complete the process for at a cost of no more than $49 which includes your first year registration fee (applies to .com, .org, .net, .ca, .us and .info).
Here are the steps they would do that you can do on your own:
1. Determine if a name is available that is either exactly the one you want or one that is sufficiently similar or relevant. This step involves going to a whois server or a registrar site and entering in your preferred domain name. Check our step-by-step tutorial for researching your domain name.
Let’s say your family name is smith so you want smith.com. You will find right off that smith.com is not available. You then check for variants such as smithfamily.com, smithweb.com, smithhome.com, wearethesmiths.com and so on until you find one that suits you. Walking Dolphins will compile a list of such alternatives for you to select from or you can do the searching and find one yourself.
2. Choose a registrar. The price and quality of service of domain registrars varies wildly. Some offer registrations of mainstream domains (.com, etc) for as little as $9.00 per year. Others charge as much as $80/year (U.S. dollars).
Be very careful about offers that seem too good to be true. Major hosting companies seed search engines and their marketing with “Free Domain Names” or “$3.99 domain names.” These offers always come with one of two catches and usually with both.
The first “catch” is that you will get a free domain name if you sign up for a hosting plan. The features of the hosting plan are unlikely to match those of hosts that are not pitching free domains. So you may get your domain name included in the price of your monthly hosting fees, but you will be buying a hosting service that is more costly and/or offers a lot less than competing hosts.
The second catch is the “$1.99 Domain Name!!!” type of offer usually is limited to the first year. On renewal you suddenly find you are paying 50% more than you would have with a “normal” registrar.
The difference to you between paying $6.00 per year and $20.00 per year may seem irrelevant. But the first consideration should be that, where you are financially able, you want to register your domain for as many years at a time as possible. This is for the simple reason of escaping price inflation as well as ensuring your domain does not expire accidentally if you failed to renew at the right time. So the difference in price between a $6.00 domain and a $20 domain is that for $20 you can get three years with the first host. You might even be comfortable taking a full ten years which is the maximum that most registrars allow, as by the time a decade passes it is highly likely they will have experienced inflationary price increases.
The second reason not to dismiss a handful of dollars price difference on this kind of purchase is because you end up being nickel-and-dimed to death. You not only have to pay for your domain name and your hosting fees, you have to pay for the software you use on your computer, you may want extra features on your web site (all so “modestly priced,” why not? right?), for your internet line, virus protection and so on and so on. The few dollars extra on everything quietly adds up to hundreds or even thousands of dollars.
Price is not the only factor. You also need to ensure that the registrar you choose is reliable and provides solid service.
“Reliable” means the registrar is not one of the fly-by-night operations that are put up as domain resellers and consist of nothing more than an interface between the reseller and the actual registrar; that the registrar has a track record of vending domains honestly and is not suspected of scooping domain names out of user searches for the purpose of trying to resell them to that user at a higher marked up price; that the routine business of dealing with your domain name will be conducted easily and honestly.
“Sound service” means that when you need to do something with your domain, such as change where it points, that you can either easily do it yourself or the registrar will do it for you quickly and without complaint. You should be clearly notified about renewal dates and fees and should be able to easily adjust any of your account information such as the contact phone number in the event yours is changed.
While these sound like very basic requirements it is a fact that different registrars rate very differently on the scales. Even the largest domain providers can be bad at service for certain types of customers. See the Secure Surfing Organization reviews.
So it really is worth the time to do the research (or have Walking Dolphins do it as part of their $49.00 package) to pick a good registrar. If you do not, you will end up spending a lot more time later, even possibly losing your domain through bad service or incompetence on the part of the poorly-chosen registrar.
If you hire Walking Dolphins to do the job for you, it is almost certain that they will get your domain registered through RegistryWeb, which is the registrar for securesurfing.net . If you went through the Secure Surfing Organization tutorial on how to research a domain, you might wonder why we or our sponsor would work through a reseller rather than a primary registrar. Check out our Registrar Review for the answer.
You may also have ethical or moral considerations, for example not wanting to have the same registrar as a major provider of pornographic domain names.
3. Once you have selected a domain name and selected a registrar, you need to actually execute the transaction with that registrar.
BE CAREFUL!
Many registrars, including some of the biggest names in the industry, make it very easy for you to authorize other purchases you may not fully realize while you are going through the domain name purchase process.
For example, it is far too common to have a feature “Add Hosting” or “With Premium Hosting” or “Private Registration” and so on with the default set to actually add the feature(s) to your package and bill you for it/them.
It is easy for an inexperienced customer to just click next, next and/or to have the impression that whatever feature being included is one that is essential to the domain registration purchase. None of this is a factor if you use Walking Dolphins to handle the whole process for you — and they are cheap.
The Secure Surfing Organization strongly recommends that if you are doing it yourself, you do not purchase your domain name at the same time you purchase any other services. In the majority of cases we recommend you do not even buy them from the same business.
The issue with having your domain registrar be the same business that is your web host has to do with freedom of action. Registrars can, and routinely do, make it very difficult for customers to “transfer” or switch to a competing registrar. Some, like 1&1, make it a multi-stage, complicated process that at the least is frustrating, even for advanced users. Others receive transfer orders but do nothing with them until a time convenient to them, typically as close as possible to the domain expiration date.
You do not want to be married to any particular hosting provider so unless the deal really is excellent, do not be persuaded to trade your freedom of movement for the promise of a free domain.
And, although it is a biased recommendation, we do recommend that you consider allowing Walking Dolphins to take care of the entire process for you. They will obtain a domain from an independent registrar for you and you will remain free to get your hosting with whoever best meets your needs. Even if you choose Walking Dolphins as your host, because they are not a registrar, your domain will be entirely separate from them.
