Domain naming, Expired domains
I’ve written before about what hositng is right for your.
Today I’m focusing more on how you should go about registering a domain.
Picking a domain name.
Google hardly ever indexes a new domain. Alot of people that create spam (yes, there are people that actually make it) register new domains for their spam site, and emails. Because of this, google “sandboxes” your new domain. Crawls it every now and then until they feel there is propper content on that site/domain.
One way of avoiding it is to register a domain that has been around for more than 6 months. Google might still sanbox it again, but it will be indexed quicker than a new domain would be. There are many sites dedicated to giving you details on expired domains. I use DNXpert. They give out a free list of expired domain names every couple of days.
I browse through them and look at witch domain name i need/want. If you are lucky, the domain that you pick allready has a pagerank. That is great because google trusts that domain.
So if you are interested in getting a domain, go have a look and see which domain suits you.
Web Hosting thats right for you
You’ve decided that you want a website, you learn that you will need to get some kind of hosting package. But what do you choose? 50 mb of space with 2 gigs of bandwidth or do you need 2 gig’s of harddrive space and 25 gigs bandwidth?
Do you get your own domain name or do you get one somewhere else? How many email addresses do yo need?
If you are starting a new company
You will need to have a hosting package that gives you storage space online and email addresses for as many people as youo have in your company. You will have to have a domain registered to you.
With a domain name, you will have to think about what you want your domain name to be. Preferably the name of your company. If you can, get a domain name that is relevant to your country. eg. If you are in South Africa, get a .co.za domain. If you are in Australia, get an .au domain. Keep that in mind when you register a domain name.
If you are looking for a blog or free website.
wordpress an blogger are both great free services that allows you to create and manage your very own blog. It is still accesable by everyone and Search engines pick it up and indexes it.
If you just need an email address.
There are many services that gives you a free email address. Gmail, yahoo, msn, hotmail, webmail ect. You just sign up with them, and setup your favourite email client to download that mail.
When you decide on what hosting solution you will need, keep these things in mind.
Robert
What is domain Propagation?
I Recently moved the domain www.global-video-pages.com from a server in Germany, to a server here in South Africa, It took about a week for the site to get back online. Why so long?
It was because of DNS Propagation.
So what is DNS propagation?
Once you make changes to your domain with the registrar you purchased your domain from, the changes will take anywhere from 5 minutes to 72 hours for propagation to occur depending on your ISP and how often they update the DNS records.
Domain propagation is the process of your registrar handing off the changes of your domain to root DNS servers, ISPs acquire records from the root servers, ISPs to other ISPs and so on until you see the changes reflect on your computer with your internet service provider. Some service providers update their records more often than others and receive changes faster. As a result of this, often you will not be able to get to your website by its’ domain name but a friend can. Simply wait out until the changes propagate to your ISP.
My blog was down yesterday and the night before. I wanted to change the IP address of my domain. Gitui.com. After about 48 hours I gave up and chaged it back to the old IP address, and it worked fine. Because of that I knew that the DNS propagation was not even started. Because all the records still pointed to the old IP address.
That is briefly what DNS/Domain Propagation is. It will affect your site and all your emails.
Domains and how hosting works
So you’ve got a company and you have just started. In today’s world, before you can really get going you will need email addresses, maybe a website. Well first of you before you even start, you will need a domain name.
This could be anything, most preferably you will want it to be your company name. A domain name in my case would be “gitui.com“. So once you have a domain name, you can then get yourself an email address. such as: director@company.com or whatever you want it to be, within the domain “company.com”
A domain is an online name registered to a person for a period of about a year, maybe 2. They are quite cheap, so everyone can have a domain name on the internet.
A website, could then only come later, Much later if you want.
Once the website is designed and ready to launch, you will then have to upload it to the server where your domain is kept. Basically a server somewhere out there that controls your emails and traffic. It also controls you DNS, website, and much more. (I will get to explaining that later.) Once you have uploaded the website to the server using a protocol named FTP, (File Transfer Protocol) your website is almost ready to go. If it is a good company you are doing your hosting through, then they would have set up your DNS already. If this is not done, you will need to ask them to do so.
That is a very basic break down of how hosting and a domains work. IF you have any questions, ask.
Over time I will be explaining more and more. But for now, ask and I will try and answer you as best as possible.
Robert
