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Obtaining a Domain Name

Before you publish a site on the Internet, you must register your unique domain name with a domain name registration authority. A domain name is an easy-to-remember web site address.

When you want to visit a web site, you enter a domain name (e.g. your-domain.com) or a Uniform Resource Locator (e.g. http://www.your-domain.com) into your browser's address bar. In order to show you the requested site, your browser first needs to find out the IP address corresponding to the requested domain name because machines address each other by IP addresses—domain names were devised for humans. So, the browser queries the name servers in the distributed Domain Name System, which translates the requested domain name to IP address and returns the IP address to the browser. Finally, the browser connects to the web server at the specified IP address and retrieves the web pages from there. Thus, to allow other users to find a site by its domain name, you must register a domain name with the Domain Name System.

When choosing a domain name for a site, consider a word or combination of words that is relevant to your business, brand name, or topic of interest. A domain name should be easy to remember. If a domain name will comprise several words, you may want to separate these words with hyphens: this will help search engines distinguish between words, therefore, the users will be able to find the site faster.

To increase the chances of finding the site for potential customers, you may also want to buy the non-hyphenated version of the same domain name, for example, yourdomain.com and redirect it to your original domain - your-domain.com. To protect a domain name, you may want to register it in different top level domains: your-domain.com, your-domain.net. For a domain name comprising a single word that users can misspell and type incorrectly, you may also want to purchase one or few misspelled versions of a domain name that you will point to your original site. To give you a real life example of how this can be: there is the Google search engine with a primary web site address www.google.com. Knowing that people sometimes swap two adjacent letters or type more letters than required, the three additional domain names pointing to the original site were set up: www.googel.com, www.goolge.com, and www.gooogle.com.

Once you have decided on the right domain name, you can register it with a domain name registration authority. Registration cost varies between registrars (usually from 4 to 10 US dollars per year).

You can register and then manage domain names (change registrant information and name server addresses) through MyPlesk.com online service offered by SWsoft, Inc.