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Setting up a Domain

What Happens When You Purchase A Domain

When you purchase a domain name, what you are really purchasing is an alias. A Domain name is like virtual name, that will be automatically forwarded to your actual, physical server. Say, for instance you purchase www.web-design-aesthetics.com. You inform the organization that sells you the domain name that anytime someone enters www.web-design-aesthetics.com into his or her browser, the browser should be routed to a subdirectory under the physical server, in this case, www.cs.niu.edu/~mcintire/main/index.html. You can even set up sub-domain forwarding, such that www.webbook.web-design-aesthetics.com goes to www.cs.niu.edu/~mcintire/webbook/index.html, and www.consulting.web-design-aesthetics.com goes to www.grics.net/~pmcintire/index.html, on a completely different server. Figure 8-1 shows an example of such domain names and how they route to their associated servers and their subdirectories.

The slick thing about this whole system is that if tomorrow you decide to move your site to a different physical server, all you have to do is notify the site where you purchased your domain name of the new physical server address, and within a few minutes all requests for your alias will be automatically routed to that new server.

Getting Started

The first step in setting up a web site is buying the domain name from a domain name provider. There are many such providers that provide varying levels of service at varying costs. Two popular, reliable, and easy-to-use providers are Domaindirect.com and register.com.

Purchasing a Domain

Here, we’ll look at the process of purchasing a domain name from www.domaindirect.com. First, enter the domain name in the search field. If the domain name isn’t yet assigned, a screen showing your name and its availability appears. Click on the name you requested, which then brings up a screen that allows you to choose a level of service.

If all you need for the moment is to reserve the name for your future use, but not yet use domain or email forwarding, choose “Domain Parking.” On the other hand, a full-service account that includes domain forwarding and email is called a “Personal Identity Account” on this site, but may go under other names at other sites. Other, more expensive, levels of service might include web site hosting, additional email accounts, and online HTML editors geared to beginners.

Regardless of which level you choose, make sure it includes a sufficient quantity of both sub-domain and email address forwards for your current use. For instance, if you plan to have two sub-accounts, www.webbook.web-design-aesthetics.com and www.consulting.web-design-aesthetics.com (as shown in Figure 8-1), you’ll need to make sure your level of service includes at least two subdomains. You can upgrade to accounts with additional features at any time.

Sub-Domains

Sub-domains can be forwarded independently of the top-level domain. For instance, let’s look at how the subdomains for www.pennymcintire.com are organized, as shown on Figure 8-7. This top-level domain currently includes the following sub-domains:

Note from the different main domains that the sub-domains don’t have to be forwarded to the same physical servers as either the top-level or other lower-level domains.

URL hiding

Another available feature for domain forwarding is URL hiding, called “URLKeeper” on Figure 8-8. Enabling URL hiding effectively obscures the site’s physical URL from visitors, instead substituting your virtual URL alias. For example, even though www.cs.niu.edu/~mcintire is the physical URL for the virtual address www.pennymcintire.com, if URL hiding were enabled, only www.pennymcintire.com will ever show in a visitor’s browser address line regardless of which page in the site a visitor opens.

Although URL hiding can make your site appear more professional, there are several potential “gotchas”. First, any external pages (that is, pages belonging to another site) opened from within your own site will appear to be from your URL unless you remember to include “target=_top” to turn off URLKeeper for those links. Additionally, any bookmarks a visitor saves for your site will refer back to your home page, not to the lower-level pages the visitor actually bookmarked. There are a few other problems associated with URLKeeper as well, such as some security issues and incompatibility with some web hosting sites; read the documentation of your domain name provider as well as your web hosting provider to see if any of these issues affect your site.

Web Mail Accounts

As mentioned earlier, you might want to set up forwarding for email accounts as well as for domains. In this way, you can route emails to the appropriate person in the organization, whether by name, like penny@pennymcintire.com, or by function, like info@pennymcintire.com. Setting up forwarding email accounts to go along with your domain name works in much the same way as domain forwarding, as you can see in Figure 8-9. Once again, the names here are aliases for the “real”, physical email addresses.

Common Domain mistakes

You might want to consider purchasing similar names or frequent misspellings to your chosen domain name. After all, potential visitors might be guessing at your domain name, or might be bad spellers. For instance, www.randmcnally.com also owns the misspelled version, www.randmcnalley.com, which routes to the site just as if it were spelled properly. Rand McNally could also consider buying www.rand-mcnally.com and www.rand-mcnalley.com, if they aren’t already owned by another organization.

What happens If Your Domain Name Is Taken

All the discussion so far has been on purchasing a domain name that isn’t currently owned by anyone. But what if you discover that the domain name you want is already spoken for? Figure 8-10 shows the screen that includes expiration date and contact information for a reserved domain name.

If your intended domain name is already owned by another organization, you don’t necessarily have to abandon that URL. You could instead contact the owner of the domain name and offer to buy it. Of course, if a website is already active under that name, it’s probably not for sale at all, or if it is, you’d probably have to pay an exorbitant price for it.

On the other hand, if the URL is currently owned but not actually in use, perhaps the owners have abandoned the site or have changed their minds about building a site. You can either wait for the domain name to expire, on the hopes that then you can snap it up at the standard rate, or, again, you could contact the owners to see if they want to sell it. Although it’s still a seller’s market (after all, the sellers know you’re seriously interested or you wouldn’t have contacted them), an unused domain name is often cheaper than one that’s in active use.

Choosing a Web Hosting Provider

A larger organization will often host its own web site on its own server. In this case, your only task is to ask the web server administrator where on the server your site will be hosted and what server privileges you’re allowed.

Individuals and smaller organizations usually don’t want the administration hassles of hosting their own site. Instead, they use a web hosting provider. Free web site hosting is often included with email and internet service from an internet service provider(ISP), and it’s also offered for free from some big portals like Yahoo.com or Geocities.com For larger web sites, though, such space may be neither large enough nor powerful enough in terms of how fast the server delivers pages or how many hits it can process. In such cases, you’ll need to go shopping for a web hosting provider. Many domain name providers can also supply web hosting (as you might have noticed on one of the tabs on Figure 8-2), or you can enter the term “web site hosting” into a search engine to find others. At the time of writing, Google listed 213 million results for this query term. Good luck sorting out the good ones from the bad ones!

Things to Consider When Chosing a Web Host

The most important considerations when choosing a web host are: