Set up your own domain : Part 1
June 3rd, 2008 by Michael Zimmermann
Ah, the true sign of a geek — someone with his or her own domain. Nothing quite says, “I roll my own” like a custom email address and URL.
Other than for bragging rights, is there any good reason to have your own domain? Can you set up the email and hosting stuff yourself? Are there low- or no-cost alternatives?
Yes, yes, and yes.
A few years ago, a few enterprising souls snapped up some cool-sounding domains, and started offering email addresses for rent. All well and good, but why bother these days, when for less than the cost of cup of coffee a day, you can have your own domain, to do with as you please.
Benefits to having your own domain
The main benefits to having your own domain are that it is personal and controllable.
Personal, because you don’t have to settle for “bob987067903@freewebmail.tv” as your organization’s email address. You may have your own website, but hosting it under “http://www.phonecablecompany.com/geocities-users/~bob987067903″ isn’t impressing any of your techy friends.
Controllable, in that if you get sick of your internet service provider (something that happens more and more with the unforgivable practices of the big providers), your email address doesn’t have to change. If you don’t like your host, you can switch it. You have your choice of what your email address can start with and the availability of domains is actually fairly broad, with a little bit of creative thinking and planning.
Decide on a domain
So, the first step is to think of a good domain name. It should be something that represents you or your organization well.
Availability is the tricky part, since at this point, you’re entering into the game fairly late. There are companies devoted to buying and selling domains with good marketing value — simple dictionary words are guaranteed to be unavailable, or at the very least, for sale to the highest bidder (We’ll have more about this in a followup article). String together a few words, however, and you can have a phrase that’s just as usable as any single word, if not more.
Remember that once a domain is chosen, the content or concept it represents determines a lot as well. You can make the mundane stand out if you excel. There are trends yet to be discovered. Think of how easy it was to tack an “e” or an “i” to the beginning of almost any word and have it sound high-tech and trendy.
Even non-sense words have gained a lot of power. Slashdot is a very popular site for nerds (I’ve also known the occasional geek to visit), yet the name is not terribly powerful to those that don’t know it. It has reached iconic stature in some circles, however, because of its reputation.
A further note, related to that last example: please consider how your domain communicates aurally, if that will be part of driving traffic or using it. For example, if you have a personal email of star@comdot.com, you may run into some confusion when leaving a voicemail with a prospective employer.
Find and buy your domain as soon as you can
A good way to check availability is to use an online resource such as domaintools.com. There are the common suffixes (also known as TLDs) that you are familiar with, such as .com, .org, and .net, and sets of country-specific TLDs. There are also specialty domains, such as .info, .biz, .edu, and these will have different sets of rules concerning price and availability.
Be prepared to buy your domain as soon as you find one that you like — you may find out that thinking it over for a week and coming back to register has taken the decision out of your hands completely.
Whether it is for business or fun, it’s disappointing to have your heart set on something and find that it’s not available. No matter how much you trust your fellow internet denizens, don’t post domains that you’re thinking about in a public forum. Think very hard about posting in a private forum as well. What may be a hobby to you is big business to some, and loyalties tend to get left by the wayside when there’s money to be made. Keep in mind that it takes seconds for a computer running a script to crawl across the text, and register the domain before you.
Stay tuned for Part 2, where we’ll talk about finding a reputable registrar, setting up your hosting, and reasons for buying an existing domain name.
references and useful links:
- http://www.domaintools.com/
- http://www.morningblog.com/
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http://www.geeksintraining.com/about/ Michael Zimmermann
If you’re the resident geek in your circle, you ask the same questions every time you have to put on your helpdesk hat. I now turn to the Support Details website to help reduce the clutter. This has to be the best site for quickly getting those standard tech support questions answered (it may sound like it, but no, I’m not paid or affiliated with them in any way — I just like them that much).
