Get a Domain Name

Terms

Domain name

The name of a website that you type in an address bar. This site's domain name is diyhosting.bhh.sh.

Top-level domain (TLD)

The extension of a domain name, like .com, .net, .xyz, etc.

Registrar

A service authorized to reserve a domain name for you.

When domain names first sell, they usually sell for very cheap, but once someone buys one, they have the rights to it until they decide to sell it, often for much, much more money. Therefore, it's a good idea to reserve a domain name ASAP, even if you didn't intend on doing anything big with it.

So let's register your domain name!

How

Domains can be registered at any accredited registrar. In this guide, I will use the registrar Epik because it is one of the more high quality and easy to use. The guides on this site will use Epik, but if you choose to register your domain with one of the many, many other registrars, you can still do most of what Epik does, albeit options and settings might appear in different menus.

Basic info about domain names

• Domain names usually require a very small yearly fee to keep registered, usually around $12 for most generic TLDs. There are some "specialty" TLDs that are more expensive, but .com, .xyz and other basic TLDs are that cheap.
• Once you own a domain, it is yours as long as you pay the yearly fee, but you can also sell it to someone for however much you want.
• Domain names do not hold your data or your website, instead, you add "DNS settings" that direct people connecting to your domain to your IP address. The purpose of a domain name is so that people don't have to remember your IP address to find your website!

Looking for domain names

Let's go to Epik's site and you can search for domain names.

You can look for whatever domain name you want. Domains that are already bought and owned by someone else might have the option to "Backorder," but it's always best to get one that is unowned, like these:

Note the differences in prices. Some "specialty" TLDs like .game and .io charge a much larger fee, although you might want one. Some domains above, like .xyz and .org have reduced prices for the first year.

Choose the domain you want and buy it. These .xyz domains are a steal now on sale.

That's all you have to do to own a domain name! As you register a domain, you can also setup an automatic payment to pay your fee yearly to keep your domain. Easy as pie.

Now we will get a server to host your website on.

More info on domains

Privacy

One worry people have when reserving a domain is that a domain registrar requires that you submit a home address! In fact, it used to be even worse: You could easily look up the information of the owner of a website by looking them up in the public WHOIS database!

But more importantly, every good registrar should include some kind of WHOIS guard, which is a service that logs a dummy address including a dummy email in the WHOIS database instead of your actual information. By the way, if the registrar you're looking at requires an extra fee for this service, switch to another. All good registrars should do this for free nowadays.