It's not so hard to get a personal domain name these days. But it takes some time, effort and money. This article may help you if you ever need to have your own domain name.
Getting a domain name -- a personalized Internet address -- is now cheap and easy. That's good, considering how many Internet providers have gone under or switched subscribers' e-mail addresses; a personal domain name means you should never have to send out those "change of address" e-mails anymore.
But finding a good domain name that's also available is a little tricky. So is picking a domain registrar, the company that will maintain your little chunk of the Internet.
Not all of the good domain names have been taken, but in the most popular category -- names ending in ".com" -- things are getting crowded. NetNames reports 21,274,294 ".com" names as of Friday [July 26, 2002].
The article lists several resources to check a domain's availability and to register it. It also gives you some advises on prices to pay. It tells you to look at customer services and to go with a company with a track record.
I lived through the whole process last year and I got some surprises. After securing my domain name, Primidi.com, I realized I only bought a package giving me the rights to one file and one e-mail address.
It was so complex to upgrade to another kind of subscription that I chose a free hosting site -- which displays easily killed pop-up ads -- in order to publish my basic static pages (check here.)
Luckily, I didn't experiment any of these problems with this Blog. A single payment of about $40 (plus taxes) was enough to publish what I care about or find interesting.
Source: Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, The Washington Post, July 28, 2002
6:08:00 PM
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