Your domain name is a super important asset, as it represents your business, your organization, or perhaps your personal brand.
You should always be the registrant of the domain names for any site you put time, money, and effort into. This is the only way to make sure you own and control this valuable asset.
Choosing a Domain Name
I have a lot of thoughts on this subject and for now, I will just scratch the surface here.
A domain name should be as simple, memorable, and easy to spell as possible. You should be able to tell someone on the phone where your website is, without having to spell it or clarify anything.
The suffix of your domain name (.com, .net, .org, .edu, and many others) is called the TLD, or Top Level Domain.
In most cases, especially for a business but also for most personal or bobby websites, you should try to get a dot-com (“.com”) name.
If the dot-com name you want is already taken, you may be tempted to just go with an alternate version such as the dot-net version. But please consider the confusion that may ensue as your customers or friends habitually type in dot-com — especially if the dot-com version is in use by a business in the same industry you are in.
Of course, there are cases where a different TLD will be expected by your audience and will make sense, such as an educational institution (.edu) or a charitable organization (.org).
The number of TLD’s is growing rapidly and I won’t attempt to list them all or discuss them further here.
Other thoughts about choosing a domain name:
- avoid hyphens unless they are meaningful for your branding (usually they look spammy)
- definitely avoid adding numbers just to make a name unique
- look for a domain name that “rolls off the tongue”
- putting keywords into a domain name for SEO is no longer a thing
Registering a Domain Name
You should expect to pay only about $12 a year for your domain names.
When you register a domain, be careful not to get sucked into the many add-ons that will be available, unless you are clear about what they are and why you need them. Most likely, the only thing you need from your chosen registrar is your domain name. Easy Peasy.
My personal favorite domain name registrar is NameCheap. The support has always been really good, and I find their site less confusing than, for example, GoDaddy, which has so many features that I tend to get lost there.
Registering Domain Email Addresses
This is a subject I will need to come back to, but just to touch on it briefly, there are several ways to get a domain email address.
In many cases, you don’t need a domain email address. You can just use your personal email address, or set up a new free email address at Gmail, Hotmail, or a number of other places.
A domain email address is an email address “at” your domain. In many cases, you don’t need a domain email address, but if you are building a business website you will probably want to have at least one.
You can most often get a domain email address, along with your domain name, from the domain name registrar.
Many, but not all, web hosting companies provide email addresses. In general, the higher-end hosting companies do not provide email hosting, but the lower-end ones almost always do. Obviously, your website and your domain emails do not have to be hosted at the same place. Be aware that it is relatively easy to change web hosts later but changing where your email is hosted is more difficult if you care about bringing all of your email history with you.
With a little elbow grease, you can set up a domain email address using a Google Workspace. The nice thing about this is that you will be using the powerful (and possibly familiar) Gmail interface, along with so many other Google services like calendar, docs, sheets, and so much more.
Setting Up Your DNS
In most cases, your DNS will be set up at your domain registrar.
If you know where you will be hosting your website, you will get an IP address from your web host. That address will need to be entered into your DNS settings at your domain name registrar.
In some cases, you will want to use custom nameservers. If that is the case, you will change your nameservers at your domain name registrar, and then your DNS settings will be entered where your custom nameservers are. For example, all of my websites use Cloudflare nameservers. There are some benefits to this which I may discuss in a separate topic. If you don’t know what I am talking about, you may safely ignore this paragraph. 🙂