This article will explains step by step how to buy domain names. Registering or to buy domain names for many newcomers to the internet seems really complicated procedure, highly technical task that a newbie cannot do. It's completely not true. You only need to get ready a bit of informations on hand before you register a domain name, and your payment method which is usually billed through Credit Card.
To buy a domain name you need to prepares:
- What are you going to call this domain (the name of the domain).
- And your web hosting DNS values, these are given to you by your hosting company and will look something like:
NS1.WEBSITEWELCOME.COM
NS2.WEBSITEWELCOME.COM
NS1.WEBSITEWELCOME.COM
NS2.WEBSITEWELCOME.COM
Both domain name and hosting space, they are almost always provided to you in pairs. So you can go to a reputable domain name registrar or you can go to reputable hosting company.
I suggest using either www.enom.com or www.hostgator.com, the last one is a hosting company but they can help you with domain name too. These companies maybe not the cheapest registrars or hosting company currently on the web but their services, and reliability are incredible. I generally work on the principle "You get what you pay for".
OK, lets walk through the process to buy domain name (registering):
- Using your web browser, visit a domain name registrar. Usually on the front page there is a search option to check if the domain name you want is available. Lets say for example, that you are trying to register a domain name for your Gardening website. So you type in gardening.com press enter, and it comes back that the domain is already taken. Now, I would suggest that you place prefix and or suffix words to the domain name you are after. So you could try type in:
bettergardening.com
bestgardening.com
gardeningguide.com
gardeningbasic.com
You could also try placing dashes "-" in your domain names to separate words. However, there are a group of search engine optimization (SEO) people who currently believe that the search engines are starting to penalize sites with 'dashes" in their domain names. Another thing, sites that do not contain dashes on their domain names and do not have any numbers in them, generally have a higher resell price. So if you think you might sell your domain sometime in the future, then it may be advisable to avoid using both dashes and numbers.
Lets say, that you find gardeningguide.com is available and decide to take it. So you move to the next page.
- Generally this asks you for the details of the person that is going to be the owner of this domain. This usually will be your name, address, phone number, email etc.
- Next the system will ask you for how long you want to register your domain for, the minimum period is 1 year and the maximum I have seen is 10 years. Most people go for the 1 year period, only because it costs the least. Usually, you will see a link that says:
"If hosting your site elsewhere, please click here to set name servers"
Please set your name servers now (using the name server values given to you by your hosting company), otherwise if you have to come back and change the default name servers at a later date, the problem is that it generally takes a long time for the name servers to propagate around the net and you could wait for several days for this to happen. But if you set them now, they should propagate within a few minutes, maybe half an hour at the most.
- Once you have typed in both name servers values, then you move onto the payment screen where you type in your credit card details or your other payment method.
At this point you may see an option called "Auto Renew". Check this box! This allows you to renew the domain automatically when its term expires. Any good domain name registrar should send you an multiple emails before the domain is set to expire, and if you take no action on these emails, then the domain will get automatically renewed. If you don't set this "Auto renew" option, then system will let the domain expired and it becomes available for someone else to purchase.
Once you press the "submit" button, it will take just a few seconds for that new domain name to be yours.