- As most folks know, a domain name is the easy-to-remember translation (courtesy of a domain name server – there’s 13 root zones of ‘em!) for the IP address for a website.
- A domain name can have subfolders (eg, mydomainname.com/mysubfolder) or subdomains (mysubdomain.mydomainname.com). In fact, I like subdomains better since they illustrate my next point, which is…
- The top level of your domain is the .com or .net or .org part of your (fully qualified) domain name.
- In fact, there are a lot of neat new ones, just waiting to catch on! I listened to an interesting podcast on NPR about a woman who had bought up the .wed top level domain. There is a few hundred of these boutique generic top level domains for sale…but maybe they won’t be so boutique pretty soon. And that lady will be laughing all the way to the bank!
- You can register one at any reputable domain registrar (like GoDaddy or BlueHost) for about $10-$15 for a year (the price tends to go up to about $50 or so a year after that – full disclosure, I did not google this, it’s just what I roughly remember from renewing some. YMMV). In 1999 the US Department of Commerce helped ensure that we now have a shared registration system, not just the one or two big guys (in fact, as of this writing there are over 900 registrars that are ICANN-accredited).
- Should you pay extra for private registration? In a word, nah. It’s a waste of money, in my opinion, and according to Ashley, it could even theoretically result in you not exactly owning your domain.
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