Technology

Things to Consider When Choosing a Domain Name

December 14, 2010 By admin Leave a Comment

When it comes to the type of internet website your company has, the most important thing isn’t how it looks, how high it ranks, or what is on it. Sure, all of these elements play a major part in how popular a site becomes, but the most important thing about a website is the domain name.

Let’s say you have an insurance company and are looking to start a website, you should put some thought put into what type of domain name you choose before you starting a website for yourself or your company. Make sure the name represents what you do as a business. Sure something like autoquote.com might sound good. But if your company specializes in home policies, then you are not representing yourself well.

Here are some other things that you should take into consideration when making a domain name. Don’t use hyphens. Hyphens can often times make a domain name rank lower in Google ranks. It is also hard to remember for customers. So if you were making a domain for 21st century insurance you would not want to choose something like 21-century-insurance, as it would be hard for people to remember where the hyphens go.

Also, if you cannot go with your company name, make it memorable. A memorable domain name is more likely to get visitors than a generic one. Try to make the name related to what you are trying to say but make it creative and catchy. You want people to be able to remember the name of your website. For example if the company – 21^st Century – mentioned above could not get its name it might want to go with something like SaveMoneyOnInsurance.com or BestInsuranceQuotes.com

Follow these tips to ensure you get a domain name that is good for you, is memorable for your customers and ranks high with search engines.

Filed Under: Domain Names, Internet, Technology, Web Hosting

What is a Domain Name?

November 29, 2010 By admin Leave a Comment

: Image via Wikipedia

A domain name is a unique collection of letters and numbers that specifies exactly the uniqueness of an internet resource, like an website. It is used to classify the billions of websites out there, so that when an user types a website URL or address, the process is not confused as to which particular website to take the user to.

There is a specific hierarchy for domain names, starting with what are called top level domains or TLDs, for example, net, com and org. There are also country code top level domains like us, in, cc etc. These are the most widely used top level domains in the domain name system or DNS hierarchy. In fact, for every country in the world, there is a country code top level domain name or ccTLD.

The governing authority that lets the public register and sell domain names is called the ICANN. While no one can "own" a domain name, buying a domain name ensures exclusive use of that domain name during the period for which it is paid for. If there is a lapse in payment, almost all domain names can back under the hammer and get resold to the public.

If you want to build a web presence, whether for you personally, or for a company or other organization, business or non-profit, you will need to first buy a domain name from one of a host of domain name resellers. These resellers, in their turn, register their domains with a domain name registrar. Once you have paid for your domain name, you can then get webspace for your domain from your web host. After that, go ahead and put up a webpage in one of the various web languages, and you are set to go and have acquired real estate in virtual space.

Filed Under: Domain Names, Education, Technology, Web Hosting Tagged With: Country code top-level domain, Domain name, Domain Name System, ICANN, Internationalized domain name, Top-level domain, Uniform Resource Locator, Website

Domain Name Registration – what is it?

November 28, 2010 By admin Leave a Comment

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While a person cannot own a domain name as such on a permanent basis, one acquires the right to use a domain name by registering it. The registration of domain names is done by domain name registrars, which are in their turn delegated to register domain names by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers or ICANN. ICANN is ultimately responsible to direct the whole system of naming and classifying the domain names on the internet.

Besides the top level ICANN, there are organizations that administer the functioning of each top level domain or TLD. These organizations look after what is called a registry, a system that stores a database of all names of domains registered under that particular top level domain. The registry, in turn, receives new domain name registration info from every authorized registrar of domain names in that top level domain. This information is regularly published, often in real time, using a system known as the whois protocol. The whois database stores every single domain name registered in the virtual world.

Every registry normally charges a small fee, to be paid monthly or annually, from a registrant of a new domain name. This fee includes the service of a set of name servers for the registered domain name. The fee is often said to be for a sale or a lease; however, the user simply acquires exclusive right to use the domain name. In this sense, users are domain holders rather than domain owners.

The whois database not only maintains a list of names for the TLD domain names, but also for the ccTLD or country code top level domains. There are 250 ccTLDs in the internet, and almost all of these have been included in a database of users, name servers, expiration dates and other details.

Filed Under: Domain Names, Education, Technology, Web Hosting Tagged With: Computers and Internet, Country code top-level domain, Domain name, Domain name registrar, Domain name registry, ICANN, Internationalized domain name, Top-level domain

Information a domain name registration needs

November 25, 2010 By admin Leave a Comment

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When you register a domain name, you are required to provide a number of information about yourself in the process. These key pieces of personal data are used to maintain your ownership of a domain name in exclusivity, and to settle any disputes as to ownership.

The first piece of information required is your administrative contact. This is the address for the entity that manages your registered domain names. This can be your own personal address, or sometimes, it can be certain organizations that handle everything for you while keeping your address hidden. Either way, the administrative contact is required to provide a valid postal address, name of record and other contact details for the purposes of verification of ownership, managing business data etc. It is also the duty of the administrative contact to make sure the website located at that domain name conforms to registration requirements; in this way, the administrative contact ensures that the domain name owner continues to possess the right to use the domain name. While not required, the administrative contact may also provide additional contact data for technical and billing purposes.

The next, optional stage, is a technical contact. This entity takes care of the name servers found under a domain name. The function of this entity is to make sure the domain name as configured by the registrant conforms with what the domain registry requires. It also takes care of domain zone data, and makes sure visitors always get access to the website lodged at that domain.

It is also required to provide data about name servers. Two or more name servers are usually part of the registration fees that a prospective registrant pays to the registrar. While one can use these provided name servers, one can also use their own name servers, host names and IP addresses.

Filed Under: Domain Names, Education, Technology, Web Hosting Tagged With: Business and Economy, Computers and Internet, Domain name, Domain name registrar, Domain name registry, Internationalized domain name, IP address, Top-level domain

Domain names as virtual real estate

November 22, 2010 By admin Leave a Comment

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Real estate the world over, as economists like to say, is in fixed supply. Barring virtual acts of science fiction, it is not possible to greatly increase the available real estate in the world. Hence, the steadily increasing price curve of real estate.

However, virtual real estate, for all practical purposes, is endless. The internet real estate is not limited by the quantity, but perhaps by the ease of access. If that is settled, the amount of real estate available is practically infinite.

Domain names, the actual identifies of your websites, are often analogized with real estate. This is because websites are like houses that sit on domain names, just like houses sit on land. It is also a fact that like good real estate, the best quality domain names carry a lot of monetary value, and can be used as marketing and advertising functions, search engines and other purposes.

Like real real estate, a great deal of barter, trading and other financial activities are carried on around domain names. Sometimes, companies will offer low cost or free domain names to users, often with some sort of a qualifier attached. One of these is that the user host their domains within the company’s website, which helps them get a lot of advertising. The websites of users are also used as advertising tools, and the money gained from this is used to make domain names free to users. In the very beginning of the domain name system, new domain name registration was free. But people soon realized the vast potential in domain name real estate. For example, just when google was born, suppose you held exclusive rights to the domain name google.com. Now, the company google would be happy to pay you probably a few million dollars to purchase this domain – that is the vast potential of domain name real estate.

Filed Under: Domain Names, Education, Technology, Web Hosting Tagged With: Advertising, Business and Economy, Company, Computers and Internet, Domain name, For Sale or Auction, Real estate, Website

Sitting on domain names

November 22, 2010 By admin Leave a Comment

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Just type google.com in your browser – this leads you to the famous google search engine website. Supposing you mistyped, and put in gooogle.com instead of google. Ever wonder where this will lead you? Try it out, you will go right back to google.

Now try using an alternate top level domain. Say, type in google.net or google.info. Where do you get? Again, back to google’s familiar search engine homepage. Now, try google.org – this time, although you do not get to google’s search engine, you still get to a website about Google’s philanthropy, the unique aspect of the org TLD, and an website obviously owned by Google.

Last thing, try typing in gooooogle.com – you will get to a page owned by some user specified as digforgold.

So, what all is happening here?

There’s a new business out there, which is basically the same thing as in real estate, where a prospector buys land for cheap, hoping to see a boom in the market for that piece of land, which he can then sell for a profit.

In virtual real estate, too, the same thing is happening. Suppose you buy a domain and a few months down the line, some company comes up with a registered name which is the same as your domain name. Now, the company will want to acquire your domain, because its prospective visitors will otherwise not be able to find it virtually. This creates a demand for your domain name, which you can then sell for a good deal of money.

Google realized this early, and therefore, either bought all google related domains outright, or purchased them from domain name sitters at some price. That is why, even if a user types google.com wrongly, chances are he will get to a domain google has already purchased, and will be redirected to google.com.

Filed Under: Domain Names, Education, Technology, Web Hosting Tagged With: Domain name, Google, Google Search, search, Search engine optimization, Top-level domain, Web search engine, Website

Advertising using domain names

November 20, 2010 By admin Leave a Comment

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There is a new sort of advertising technique in the market today, one that helps people make a good deal of money. One of the primary resources marketeers look for in a web entity offering ad space is domain and website network. If an ad agency online has a vast network of affiliate websites, it naturally gets more visitors from search engines. Hence, companies looking to market their brands becomes interested.

It is easy to create a large database of registered domain names if you have a small amount of money to spare. But creating 100s of 1000s of websites is tricky – it takes a vast amount of time and resources to create so many websites, make them look unique, and provide unique content to them.

But then some bright mind comes up with a brilliant idea. How about letting people create these websites for you, for free, and provide unique content as well? That would be an excellent solution, the only problem being, why would anyone want to do that for you?

The answer, provide them with a free domain name. Let them get the domain name for free – it costs only a few dollars a year, anyways; and let them design and build their own websites. Once they do that, a condition becomes active that lets the ad agency who gave away that domain for free to insert brief ads in the website, and whatever money the ad makes, goes to the ad agency, not the website’s creator.

This is a great and simple model of a new sort of online advertising, where a company can create thousands upon thousands of real estate to display ads, without spending much money at all. All they have to do is give away the website domain names for free, and the public out there would build their ad network.

Filed Under: Domain Names, Education, Technology, Web Hosting Tagged With: Business and Economy, Company, Computers and Internet, Domain name, For Sale or Auction, General Brokers, online business, Website

Web Hosting

November 15, 2010 By admin Leave a Comment

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Web hosting was never so challenging and demanding as it is now. With growing net penetration and increasing web awareness, every other organization is now in queue to have their own web-identity established soon. Towards this, many low to medium level web hosting companies have emerged over the years offering absolutely easy-to-catch hosting solutions. These so called e-companies undertake entire task of web designing, domain registration, web-hosting, etc. along with providing complete package of e-commerce solutions.

Contrary to popular belief, web hosting is a costly affair now days. Some of the companies even offer hosting services at as low as $5 a year. However, considering high-end web availability and regular maintenance, your yearly hosting price may increase many folds.

As web hosting is considered one of the primary parts of any e-savvy business, the segment is opening new opportunities every alternate day with huge potential to grab market attention. If you turn your eyes around, you will find hosting companies are in fight to stay ahead of others by offering various types of attractive and cheap offers including free gifts, free web maintenance for limited periods, etc. While dealing with such companies, you must ensure checking their credentials from your social networking and their users. In most of the cases, cheap web hosting companies fail to deliver their promised services in consistent manner. If your online availability is not of prime concern, you may move with your hosting efforts without giving much importance to the company’s viability; else, you must not accept any hosting offer that does not guarantee staying online more than 99 per cent. 99.5 percent uptime is the standard that you may expect for your online requirement. Customer support post-hosting is another creamy area where most of the companies offering web-hosting services love to play with tricks. Be aware and stay informed about such nitty-gritty before finally selecting your preferred hosting company.

Filed Under: Domain Names, Education, Internet, Technology, Web Hosting Tagged With: Business and Economy, Computers and Internet, Hosting, Web Design and Development, Web Hosting, Web hosting service, Website, World Wide Web

The Advantages Of Shared Web Hosting

November 12, 2010 By admin Leave a Comment

While designing a website, the person has to keep in mind that it serves as stage to display intentions (products and services) of the company to customers. Coming to the hosting plans, there are many varied choices of hosting available in the market to choose from for advertising products of different kinds of businesses.

Among all the other hosting plans present in the market, shared hosting has become quite prominent kind of hosting and it is also contemplated to be the best hosting plan for any type of website. If the website owner has small business which proposes to use the website as a method of endorsing their products, then shared hosting would be more than suitable for them which also press for high charges to host the site over World Wide Web. In order to advance with shared hosting the business owner has to have thorough knowledge about what exactly is shared hosting and the advantages they can attain by using this hosting service.

What is Shared hosting?

As the name indicates shared hosting is the service provided by companies where the web server will simultaneously host WebPages from numerous other websites.
Depending on the size of the website which has to be launched over internet, specific amount of space on the web server will be assigned to the website.
It should be noticed that even if different websites use same web server, they only function in their allotted space on the server.

Advantages of using Shared hosting

- Economical or Affordable: It is quite natural that any individual or businessman desires to receive high quality services at reasonable or cheaper prices. Shared hosting provides hosting services at prices affordable by any one along with services which are sure to satisfy customer’s needs.

- Convenience: consumer will not be burdened with management of server, which will usually be taken care of by professional hosting team with appropriate knowledge and skill in technical details which can be sophisticated for business owner or an inexperienced person to handle. Shared hosting gives ample time for website owners to focus on techniques to improve their business and consign the hosting management issues on the professional’s list of worries.

- Customization: Clients are provides with additional features as per their requirements yet no extra charges are put on them for this. Clients are also given permission to supervise and manage the content of their websites stored on the web server, giving the customer a feel that they are their own boss and can do anything they wish to with their website.

- Efficiency:Speed of the website navigation will depend on the server space assigned to website and also the bandwidth allocated to the site.

- Technical support:Along with other services which though provided for are not charged; even the technical support offered by the company can be availed for free of charge. Other than other services, the customer has special inclination for companies that promise to provide 24/7 customer support so that they can have their website functioning continuously even in case the server crashes in middle of the night.

Shared hosting is considered one of the affordable hosting plans available in the bazaar and is also well thought of as the best choice for business who wish to promote their product at lower prices over the internet and also for people entering the cyber world for first time.

Filed Under: Domain Names, Education, Technology, Web Hosting Tagged With: Dedicated hosting service, MySQL, Shared web hosting service, Small business, Technical support, Virtual private server, Web hosting service, Website