Tips For Choosing A Registrar
Determine which services you require
You may want services like email hosting or support offered in French, so find out what each registrar offers. Remember, if you registered your .CA domain name as an individual you have free WHOIS privacy protection already included.
Check references
Seek out customer reviews and testimonials, and ask friends or colleagues for a recommendation. You may find that some registrars come highly recommended by your peers. If you make a mistake, you can always transfer your .CA domain to another registrar.
Shop around
Shop around to get a good understanding of how much your domain name, and additional services, will cost. Registrars may offer bundles, packages, or special promotions. Keep in mind that cheapest isnt always necessarily best.
Register Your Corresponding Social Media Handles
Social media is key these days whether we like it or not.
The average web-connected human , and, in total, a month. Thats BILLION.
What Im trying to say is: People are much more likely to check whats going on with your brand on Facebook than by actually visiting your website. This is just one of the reasons why you absolutely have to have your professional profiles set up on the most popular social media sites.
Whenever possible, get the same handles as your domain name. If these are taken, be creative and use some suffixes or prefixes. Some options: now, daily, hq, get, app. For example, my fictional Lotterio.com brand could go by LotterioHQ on Twitter.
Set Your Domain To Auto
Generally, when you register your new domain name, you get to choose the registration period the time span during which the registrar keeps the domain active on your behalf. Most commonly, everyone registers their domain names for either 12 or 24 months.
After that initial period, your domain name needs to be renewed . Otherwise, it becomes inactive. And then, after a short while, if you miss your window, the domain goes back to the pool of available domains, which means anyone will be able to register it.
What usually happens in case someone doesnt make it in time with renewing their domain is that the domain gets snatched by a domain broker or someone similar. Basically, aged domains are valuable in the domain market, plus theres higher chance that the person who originally failed to renew the domain will want to buy it back at some point.
In the end, stay safe by opting to renew your domain name automatically whenever the time comes. Nearly all domain registrars give you this option. Heres what it looks like with Namecheap:
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What Is The Domain Name System
The Domain Name System is a technical process by which domain names are translated into their corresponding Internet Protocol addresses .
As we mentioned previously, every website has a unique, complex string of numbers and letters known as an IP address that computers use to render a web address to an end user.
While humans use words, letters and numbers to navigate to a specific website, the internet uses IP addresses to identify the web pages location.
When you type in the domain name or URL that you want to visit, the DNS works behind the scenes to find the sites correct IP address, and then it connects you to the website.
A Brief History Of Top
There are over 1,000 TLDs available and new ones are coming out all the time.
Top Level Domains are the suffixes at the end of every URL. .com is the most well-known TLD, but its hardly the only one. In fact, there are over 1,000 TLD options available. Not all of them are available to the public, but thats still a lot of options.
The name .com comes from the word commercial and the first domain name to use it was symbiolics.com, in 1985. Before TLDs, if you wanted to reach a website, you needed to connect to it through its IP address. Each server you connect to still has its own IP address you can reach, but that proved too unwieldy for everyday use. To tackle that problem, the Domain Name System launched in 1985.
Its thanks to the DNS you can connect to your favorite websites using simple-to-remember names. More importantly, keeping a record of registered domains enables us to avoid duplicates. TLDs are an integral part of this system and back when they launched, options were more limited. Aside from .com, 1985 also saw the launch of multiple other TLDs, including staples such as .org, .edu, and .net. Over thirty years later, all those TLDs are still common the web.
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Ly Sy Tv And Other Country Domains Are Risky Do Not Buy Them
Im updating this post to include a warning about .LY and other vanity domain names that belong to foreign countries. For example, .LY belongs to Libya and in the past, the registrar has been shut down due to wars within Libya. In 2011, this resulted in the company Letter.ly getting shut down because their domain expired during that shutdown and the domain was quickly snatched up by another company when they returned. These foreign-based registrars do not abide by US law and are extremely risky to purchase. For the record, .SY belongs to Syria and .TV belongs to the Tuvalu Islands, a series of nine slivers of earth in the middle of the South Pacific, with a population of about 10,000. Buy these extensions at your own risk.
Sometimes Dont Go For The Com
Sorry. I know Im making things confusing, but please bear with me.
There are some exceptions to the .com rule:
Chiefly, if your website is meant to cater to a local audience, consider going for a local TLD. For example, building a blog for the German market? How about getting a .de address?
Doing this will give your users that little bit of additional awareness and boost your trustworthiness by making it clear youre in their country .
But even with that, you shouldnt limit yourself to just that local domain name. You may still want to expand your brand in the future, and, if that happens, you dont want to find out that someone has already taken your .com.
So, at the end of the day, even if you want to cater to a local market, you can still benefit in the long run by getting the .com version as well. And, in the meantime, you can link the .com to your local domain, so, no matter which address someone visits, they still end up at the same website.
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Is Info Domain Safe
Data security is a big concern for many website owners and visitors.
For internet surfers, not all domains are equal. Domain companies often cut corners when it comes to security concerns for certain domains. This can be risky as spammers and cybercriminals can target such lapses. And this can cause irreparable damage to your business and reputation.
So, if you register your website with a .info extension, will you be compromising on the safety of your visitors?
McAfee considers .info to be a risky domain to visit. It has flagged 11.7 percent of .info websites as dangerous or potentially dangerous for visitors. Although no domain extension is 100% secure in this regard, this number is significantly higher than other extensions. For instance, only 5% of .com sites were identified as dangerous.
Having a .info wont automatically make your website spam. However, there is a tendency for spammers to go for .info extensions due to the lower offer price.
That is why it has a bad reputation and is trusted less. So, even if your website is genuine, potential visitors may not be confident to click on your URL. This can indirectly affect your sales and branding potential.
Can I Register For New Domains Via Whois Domain Lookup
You can use the Whois lookup service to find the registration status of a domain name. If the domain has not been registered and is available, you can use Whois.com to register the domain name.
Alternatively, if the domain name has already been registered, you can either register similar available domain names that we suggest, or use the contact information provided in order to get in touch with the owner and respectfully negotiate a sale. Do note that unsolicited contact is forbidden using the information provided via the Whois lookup service.
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How To Buy A Website Domain For Ever
As we explained, domain names are not for complete sale. Essentially, you are reserving domain name usage for a set period . But you can keep renewing your domain name as many times as you want to.
While you cannot buy it out for good from a registrar, you can hold on to your domain name for as long as you are paying your renewal fee.
Ology: Who We Studied And How
We conducted this research using a tricky survey structure with three major parts:
Part 1: Perceived trustworthiness. We asked how trustworthy people would expect a site to be based purely on its URL, using the made-up brand mattressrankings.__ as the domain, with the blank filled in randomly with either .com, .net, .org, or one of the five other domain extensions I mentioned above.
Part 2: Palate cleanser. The second part of the survey consisted of several unrelated questions designed to distract people and find out their demographics.
Part 3: Memorability. Now that theyd been distracted for a little while, in the last part of the survey we asked people to write the exact URL they saw at the beginning.
Here were the demographics of the 1,500 people surveyed:
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Why Go With Net
Yes! You’ll need to sign up for a Verizon Small Business Essentials plan. Make sure your domain is ready to transfer and supply the authorization code.
The details will vary slightly depending on your current domain registrar. But don’t worry, its easy. Learn more in the Help Center.
How Do I Buy A Domain Name
Its easy to get a new domain. Here are the steps:1. Decide on a domain name extension. The extension is the part at the end of the domain name .net, .biz, .org or .com, for example.2. Think about what you’d like on the other side of the dot. It could be your business name or your specialty.3. Type the domain you want into the box at the top of this page. We’ll tell you if that particular domain is available and show other you may like better.4. Pick a domain, add it to your cart and check out. You are now the proud owner of your very own domain. As long as it’s registered to you, no one else may use it.
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Always Go For The Com
Let me say this again: Wherever possible, always go for a .com domain. Exhibit A: This site.
Technically speaking, the .com is just one of many domain name extensions that are available . Some of the other popular options include, .net, .org, .co, .edu, .biz, or even things such as .shop, or .blog.
And while all those fancy TLDs are tempting, getting the classic .com is nearly always the right thing to do. Two reasons:
What all of this means is that if your perfect .com is taken, then perhaps you should either forget about that name entirely or try contacting the current owner to see if theyre willing to sell the domain to you. Warning! This could be expensive.
Check The Domain History Via Whois
Right after Wayback Machine, who.is is your other go-to tool for getting to know the history of a given domain name. This one is very useful for at least two reasons:
- First, you can see the current domain info stuff like who the owner is who the registrar is, and so on. Theres no point in me listing everything here just go to who.is, input your favorite website and see whats up.
- Second, who.is gives you access to a whois history report. This is a paid service $10 but the price tag is rather small in relation to what you get in return, which is all the whois data associated with a given domain name from the very beginning. This means that you can see what the domains history is, when it was registered, and how many times it potentially changed hands.
In the end, if youre considering getting an existing domain, which can be quite pricey, spending an additional $10 doesnt seem that brutal. Plus, it can save you headaches later on.
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Killer Tips To Help You Choose Your Domain Name
Before you run off in search of your domain name, here are a few tips to help you make the right decision:
1. Keep Your Domain Name Short
If at all possible, keep your domain name short. Aim for a domain name that is under 15 characters, as anything longer might be harder for people to remember. There is also an inherent risk of typos in longer domain names, which can lead to potential visitors winding up somewhere other than your website.
2. Avoid Using Hyphens
Its worth mentioning that you should avoid using hyphens in your domain name whenever possible. The reason for this is twofold. First, hyphens in domain names are usually associated with spammy domains, and second, there is a good chance people will forget the hyphen and end up on a non-existent or a completely different website.
3. Make It Easy to Spell and Remember
Chances are, you will find yourself in a situation where your domain name will pop up as a topic in a conversation. The last thing you want to do is give out a long and overly complicated domain name that’s hard to remember. Similarly, if youre talking to someone on the phone, its a lot easier to spell out a short domain name than it is to spell out a really long domain name.
4. Avoid Double Letters
Similarly to the point above, avoid doubling up on letters. If your last name begins with the same letter as the last letter of your first name, consider switching them around to avoid any typos and potential loss of traffic.
Why Find A Com Domain
Think of a website address. Any website address. Unless a government or nonprofit site came to mind, chances are, the domain extension is .com. In fact, 52% of all websites are .com sites.
Especially if you’re going to be telling people what your website address is , there are benefits to using the default domain extension .com simply for easy recall.
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