Get a FREE fully-working copy of Steganos Security Suite 7 (worth £49.99) when you sign up to the Practical PC Newsletter. Buying your own Domain Name
Treat Your Web Site to a 'Proper' URL
It can be a pain trying to remember your web page's full address, especially if it is something like members.aol.com/Mywebsite/index.htm. Wouldn't it be nice to have something a bit more obvious or even a bit more interesting such as www.bizarre-goat-stories.com? People would find it much easier to remember which would help increase your hits. Buying your own domain name and getting your site to appear at that address isn't as hard or expensive as you'd think.
Buying the Domain
First of all, you need to buy (or more correctly rent) a domain name. The cost of this has dropped dramatically recently and you can now get a .co.uk address for £2.89 a year or a .com address for £8.99 a year. Depending on the suffix i.e. .co.uk or .com etc, you generally have to rent a domain name for a minimum of two years. Some domains such as .name only require a one year minimum. After that you need to remember to renew it or risk someone else getting it if it is a particularly good one.
Typically, when you buy a domain name, the company you go through will provide a few 'free' features to go along with this. As an example, www.123-reg.co.uk provides you with web forwarding (pretty much essential and more on this shortly), forwarding of up to 100 email aliases and catch all email forwarding.
It is worth noting that the vast majority of domain names that are remotely memorable have already been snapped up so you may have to be a bit creative when choosing a name that hasn't already been taken. You can easily check this at the time you order as most firms have the facility to search for your chosen address to see if it already exists.
With prices so cheap, it is suddenly viable to create joke, topical or spoof addresses almost at will. How do you fancy owning www.england-won-the-ashes.co.uk or www.trek-enteprise-sux.com?
Making Your Site Appear at your New Address
Just owning the domain name isn't much use in itself. As noted above, buying a domain name also brings with it web forwarding. This means that when someone types in 'www.bizarre-goat-stories.com', they will be taken to your chosen web site address usually hosted by your ISP. This sounds great but you should be aware that as soon as they click on a link to a sub page, their browser would no longer show www.bizarre-goat-stories.com but change to the real address such as members.aol.com/dave1234/goats. To get page addresses like www.bizarre-goat-stories.com/talltales/index.htm you'd really need to investigate having your web hosted by the same firm that looks after your domain name. To be honest, once someone has got as far as your web site, the actual address that shows in their browser is neither here nor there unless your web site is being used for professional purposes. However, if you do want things to look correct, you'll need to get proper site hosting by a third party such as www.5quidhost.co.uk who offer excellent free hosting packages despite their name
Email Extras
What happens if someone emails 'information@bizarre-goat-stories.com'? With email forwarding, you can arrange to have any emails with that address automatically forwarded to your normal email account(s). You could set up a range of addresses under the bizarre-goat-stories.com domain and have them forward to different email addresses you already use. This is very useful if you want a sacraficial email address for signing up to websites. You could start with 'signup1@bizarre-goat-stories.com' and when that starts attracting too much spam, delete it and start 'signup2@bizarre-goat-stories.com' and so on.
What about if someone either mistypes an address or guesses an address such as fluffy@bizarre-goat-stories.com? Using the so called 'catch all' option you can either have any non specified addresses sent to a particular address or you can have them sent back to the sender with a message advising that no such address exists. Not bad for £2.89 a year!
Summary
It is now very cheap to have your own 'real' domain name. It is also extremely easy to configure it to forward your email to nominated addresses allowing you to create a far more memorable presence on the net. There are plenty of companies out there offering such services so prices couldn't be keener and the range of value added features are getting better and better.
