A domain is the one piece of your setup that everything else hangs off. The site answers on it, the mailboxes live on it, the certificate is issued for it, and the links other people have published point at it. Hosting can be swapped in an afternoon; a domain you have outgrown costs you every link you ever earned. It is worth half an hour of thought before you register one.
Choosing the name
The only test that matters is whether somebody can hear the name once, in a noisy room, and type it correctly afterwards. That rules out more than it sounds like it does:
- Hyphens and digits. Nobody says "hyphen" out loud, and "4" and "for" are the same sound. If you need one to get the name you want, the name is taken.
- Deliberate misspellings. They look available because they are, and you will spend the rest of the project correcting people.
- Words that change meaning when run together. Read the whole string, without the space, before you buy it.
- Somebody else's trademark. A name chosen because it is close to a known brand is not a bargain; it is a dispute waiting for the brand's lawyers to notice. Search the trademark register for the country you trade in before you commit.
Length matters less than people think. A name of three words that reads cleanly beats a clever contraction nobody can spell.
Choosing the extension
There are more than seven hundred extensions available, and the choice usually comes down to three cases. A .com is still the one people type by reflex, so if the exact name is free there it is normally worth taking. A country extension signals where you trade and can be the better choice when your customers are all in one place. Everything else (the industry and interest extensions) works perfectly well, but expect to say it twice on the telephone for the first year.
Two practical warnings. First, some extensions are restricted: the registry only accepts applications from a particular kind of organisation and asks for documents to prove it, so a Register button is no guarantee that your order can be fulfilled. Second, the first-year price and the renewal price are not always the same number, and the renewal is the one you will pay for as long as you keep the name. Check both on the domain pricing page before you decide, and see what a domain renewal costs for why some extensions renew higher than they register.
Checking whether it is free
Type the name into domain search. The answer comes from the registry rather than from a cached list, so a name reported as available really is available at that moment, which is also why a popular name can go between checking it and paying for it. If the name is taken, WHOIS will usually tell you who holds it and when the registration expires; a name that expired last week and is still showing as registered is in its renewal grace period and is not about to be released.
If the exact name is gone, try another extension before you try another name. Changing .com for a country extension keeps the brand intact; changing the brand does not.
Registering it
Registration asks for a registrant contact, and the details go to the registry rather than staying with us. They need to be real and the e-mail address needs to be one you can read: most registries send a verification message to it and suspend the domain if nobody clicks the link within a fortnight. That is the single most common reason a brand-new domain stops resolving in its first month.
Two settings are worth getting right on day one. Identity protection, where the registry allows it, replaces your personal details in the public record with the registrar's; without it, your name, address and e-mail are published. Auto-renew should be on unless you have a reason for it to be off: a domain that lapses goes through a redemption period that costs considerably more to recover from than a renewal would have. Both are toggles on the domain's page in the client area.
Pointing it somewhere
This is two layers, and confusing them is what makes DNS feel harder than it is. The nameservers decide which service answers questions about your domain. The records are the answers that service gives. Changing nameservers moves the whole zone; changing a record edits one answer inside it.
If the domain and the hosting are both here, use the nameservers given in your hosting welcome details and the records are created for you. If you keep the zone with us and host elsewhere, edit the records directly under DNS on the domain's page. The ones you will actually use:
A: the IPv4 address the name resolves to. One for the bare domain, usually one forwww.AAAA: the same thing for IPv6.CNAME: an alias pointing one name at another, which is how most external services ask to be connected.MX: where mail for the domain is delivered. Pointing the website somewhere new without moving theMXrecords is how people accidentally lose their e-mail.TXT: SPF, DKIM and the verification strings that services ask you to add to prove you own the name.
Every record has a TTL, the number of seconds other servers are allowed to remember the old answer. If you know a move is coming, drop the TTL to a few minutes a day beforehand; the change then takes effect almost immediately instead of taking as long as the old TTL. Plan on a day for a nameserver change to be visible everywhere, and do not judge it by your own browser, which caches harder than anything else in the chain.
After it is live
Turn the registrar lock back on if you unlocked it, check that mail still arrives as well as the website, and put the expiry date somewhere you will see it even if the renewal notices go to a mailbox you stop reading. Pointing a domain at your hosting walks through the same steps with the screens in front of you.