How to choosing a domain name

Visitors will find your website by its domain name. The domain name has two parts: the name + the extension (.com, .org, .co.uk, etc.). A domain name which is meaningful and easy to remember is a great asset. With almost all "good" domain names taken nowadays it's hard to find a good name. As the title of this article suggests, the website name should be also the domain name of the site. When people think of your website, they think of it by its name. If your website name is also your domain name, they'll automatically know where to go. What happens if your site is called "Hosting", yet your domain name for it is www.myhosting.com? Your customers, recalling that they visited a site called Hosting, will type www.hostingprofs.com in the address bar of their browser and they'll end up on another site and you'll loose a sale.

There are a few tips to consider when choosing a website name (also known as the website address, URL or domain name):

    Try and get a name that is related to your business, your products or your services. For example try to find a domain name which includes your company name or your product name, because that is the first thing that people will try in their browsers. This is also a good practice when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO). Having a popular or meaningful keyword in your website name, will help your website rank higher in the searches results for that keyword;
    If you can't get the domain name you want, consider alternate forms of the name you typed. For www.hosting.com for example, consider www.besthosting.com, www.myhosting.com, www.webhosting.com, www.thehosting.com and so on. But be careful here, as some alternate forms might chase away visitors. For example if you consider naming the site www.cheaphosting.com, some people might associate the site with only cheap and maybe non-professional hosting offers.
    Very often you'll find the .com domain taken but the .net, .org or country specific extension domain free. The .com extension is the most popular and most used domain extension so it's preferable to get a .com domain name. But if you can't get the .com domain name you want, then you might want to consider other extensions. It's better to have for example, a meaningful and easy to remember .net domain than an obscure .com domain that is not related to your business, or it's not easy to remember. Country specific domains (such as .co.au, .us) are also popular within individual countries. If you do business in the United States, getting a .us will create a local branding and attract more visitors from U.S., but in the meantime might restrict the flow of customers from other countries. The only draw back for a domain name ending in other extensions is that people are so used with websites ending in .com that you might loose some visitors to your "fellow" .com website.
    If you found that .com domain name you were looking for, consider buying multiple domain names for the same website. The idea is to protect yourself against the competition. So, if you have a site about search engine optimization (SEO) called www.bestseo.com, you'd be interested in getting www.best-seo.com, www.bestseo.us, www.bestseo.net and perhaps other similar URLs containing the desired keywords. This way you can prevent other sites from popping near your name. The same idea goes with getting "typos URLs" for your site. What's a URL typo? Here's a simple example: what do you think is the most common typo for www.google.com? You're right! It's www.gooogle.com. Try and type www.gooogle.com and see where you'll end up. Some SEO experts will say that this is not good but it's ok to have multiple domains for your site as long as you redirect them to your main site using the 301 redirect code.

The conclusion is that you need to get your domain name before anything else! Even before starting the work on the website itself. To register your domain you need to do it with an ICANN accredited registrar. There are a lot of domain registrars, some more expensive than others, our recommendation is the ICANN accredited GoDaddy registrar. Registering a .com domain name for 1 year is less than $10 and can be done in 2 minutes. So, what you're waiting for? Get that domain name before someone else registers it! :)

If you need help on registering a domain name, you can find more information in our small tutorial for registering a domain name with GoDaddy.com.
The domain name - web hosting relation

So, what has the domain name to do with hosting a website? Well, there is a close relationship between your domain name and your web host (the computer where you'll host the website). The domain name is in fact a "label" that will redirect the visitors to the IP address of the computer where the site is hosted, so these two work in pairs. We use this system because it's easier to remember a name rather than an IP address which is a group of 4 numbers, each number between 0 and 255 (e.g. 67.72.123.201). The pair domain name - IP address is then recorded by a DNS (Domain Name Server). But, although they are related, the website/domain name and the hosting server are two different things, so one should not confuse the domain name of a website with the hosting for that website.

Here's an analogy with real life to better understand the concept. Let's say you want to call your friends, the Smiths, to invite them over for dinner. You ask your wife to do it, as you are a little busy at the moment. She doesn't know the number by heart so she goes and searches the number in the phone book and calls them.

This example almost replicates the way domain names and hosting works. The Smiths are the equivalent of the domain name. You didn't ask your wife to call a number; you just said call the Smiths. Of course, the Smiths have a telephone number associated with their name, that's how you can actually reach them by phone. The telephone number is the equivalent of the IP address of the computer where the site is hosted. The role of the phone book is also an important one. It helps you find the match: name - phone number. The phone book role is played by the DNS servers. They are a network of "phone books" that know every association domain name - IP address, so when you write a website address in your browser, you get the content of the site that is associated to that name and not the content of another site (or empty content).

To change hosting, you simply redirect the domain name to another IP and modify the DNS servers of your domain name. Of course you also need to actually move the files to the new hosting server. It's like the Smiths getting a new phone number. The name stays the same, but they can be reached by calling a different number.

Some hosting companies offer a free domain name if you buy a hosting package from them. While this is a nice bonus one must be careful accepting it. Make sure your domain name is registered in your own name, with your up-to-date contact information. Letting your hosting company register the domain name can cause headaches when you decide to change your host. From our experience we haven't had problems of this nature with the recommended packages, but if you want to be "safe", register the domain name at an ICANN accredited registrar. If you ever have purchased anything online or filled out a form on a website, you already have all the skills you need.

In conclusion, when you're buying a domain name, you're buying in fact the right to redirect that URL to a web server of your choice, where your website is hosted. You can even buy a domain name without having hosting yet, you can add/modify the IP and NS (Name Servers) values later on, after the website is ready and all files are moved to the hosting server. That's why the first thing to do is buy the domain name!