Getting your own domain in 4 easy steps

Getting your own domain in 4 easy steps

Latelly I've had some friends asking me how to get their own domains, like I now have mine. So why not just post a small tutorial on how to get your own domain! Below you'll find a brief description on what you have to do.

Step 1: Choosing your domain

First you have to choose your domain name. Choosing a domain name is not choosing www.pabrantes.net or blog.pabrantes.net, those are subdomains. You just have to choose pabrantes.net. After owning the domain you can (or probably will be able to) create all the subdomains you wish.
A good way to see if the domain you have chosen is available is to use whois, if you run any kind of Unix OS (please read as *nix, linux, BSD, OS X) you'll probably have a whois utility that you can access by typing whois at your terminal. Otherwise, you can always use a web interface.

Step 2: Registering your domain

There are plenty of domain registrars, which can register your domain. Just look for the best deal. I for example, registered my domain at Go Daddy due to all the features they give, cheap price and because one of my friends sugested it to me. But it's always best to do some search on google and asking friends before selecting a registrar.

Step 3: Setting up Hosting

By now, you are a proud owner of a domain. Although, you still have a problem. It has to point somewhere… Where will you host it? Most of the time you have 3 scenarios:

• At home, where you have a static IP (your IP doesn't change)
• At home, where you have a dynamic IP (your IP changes)
• At a hosting company

If you have a static IP it's very easy, you just have to tell your registrar your IP, in order for him to update the DNS entries. Although, static IPs tend to be expensive, and most of the Internet Server Providers sell accounts with dynamic IPs. This leads us, to the second option.

Having a dynamic IP at home is, by the time I'm writting this post, the most common. So what you have to do, is delegating the DNS to someone that allows you to have dynamic IPs. ZoneEdit (which is free up to 5 domains per account) is an example and it's the one I use, but it's not the only one. Just look for free dns servers services that support dynamic dns. After registering yourself into that new service, you'll have new DNS servers, set your domains DNS servers to those and it's done.

Finally we have the third option, using a hosting company has solution, if you are thinking in going through this one, you might want to first see companies and see if they also register the domain for you, if they do, it's less work for you. Anyway thinking that you already have the domain registered and you just found a hosting company that suits you, you have two choices, either you redirect from your domain to the hosting company URL, for example, you would enter www.mydomain.com and it would redirect to name.HostingCompany.com, or you can mask your domain, this is mostly the same but in the URL bar it still shows up www.mydomain.com. This is achieve using frames, although most of the times this is not a search engine optimized option and they won't crawl your site.

Step 4: You're Done

You're all done, now if you want to have a webpage, get a web server running, like apache. After that tell everyone about your page and submit it to search engines.

But you might want a domain in order to have a simple way of accessing your computer at home by ftp, vnc, ssh, etc. In those cases think if you really need a mydomain.com, .net, .whatever, or if a subdomain at dyndns.org will suit you. DynDNS gives for free, support for dynamic DNS but your host will be a subdomain of their domains, so you won't have your own domain.. It's up to you!