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Pick and Register Your Domain

Here's where things get tricky. With 100,000 domains being snapped up every month, getting a good one is quite a trick. But don't give up hope. Domain "leases" run out and sometimes aren't renewed, so names come back into circulation. Go to the domain registrar of your choice and enter a name in the search box to see if it's taken.

Domain names can contain the letters a to z, the numbers 1 to 9, and the hyphen character only. Although a domain name can be up to 67 characters long (often quoted as 63 characters, since the four characters in .com or .net count toward the total), it pays to keep the domains as short as reasonably possible.

Look for hints. Often, your domain name of choice will be taken. Some registrars offer hints for getting domains like it. Register.com provides a list of possible name variants at the bottom of every results page. Network Solutions' MyNameFinder generates possible domain names based on keywords you enter. But most convenient of all is Dotster's NameSpin, which provides a list of available alternatives based on your ideal (and already taken) domain name.

When you find a name you like, different registrars want you to make decisions in different orders. Some require you to decide how you want to handle the domain up front--bring your own hosting, park it with the registrar, or take advantage of a registrar-run hosting service. (I'll handle those issues in the next section.) All of them, however, want you to give about five contact names and addresses--all of which may be you. The different contacts the registrar wants are:

• Administrative contact: This will likely be your name; it's for the person who makes decisions about the domain name.
  
  
• Organization: This might be your company, your name, a client you're registering for, or your doing-business-as alias. (There's usually a check box so you can repeat the information from the administrative contact fields.)
  
  
• Technical contact: This person handles aspects and decisions about hosting your domain--including IP addresses, aliases, and authoritative name servers. If you park the domain at the registrar or arrange to have the domain hosted when you register it, these details will be handled for you.
  
  
• Zone contact: This is almost always the same as the technical contact.
  
  
• Billing contact: Registrars won't let you register without this name. This contact, especially the e-mail and mailing address, must always be up-to-date--since this person handles not just the initial billing but the renewals, too.
  
  

Consider your privacy when you're filling in the contact information: It will all remain publicly available. People can (and do) mine the domain registration database for telemarketing and junk-mailing purposes. Within a month of registering a domain, you may have phone calls, junk faxes, mailings from hosting companies, and spam messages by the dozen. Consider P.O. Box numbers, voice mail services, and heavily filtered e-mail accounts for your contact info.

Those aren't the only details your registrar will need. Naturally, it will need payment info. Payment is usually by a credit card, although ICANN-accredited registrar Global Knowledge Group will handle payment by check, and America Online's domain registration through CompuServe tacks the charges onto your CompuServe bill.

Trademark your domain. In the event of a domain name dispute, domain registrars always side with trademark holders. Before you register an important domain, check whether it may already infringe on someone else's trademark by conducting a $35 U.S. and Canadian trademark search atNameProtect.com. At that same site, you can complete an online application for U.S. Federal Trademark Registration (it'll set you back $65). And once you've got your trademark, NameProtect.com offers a free NameGuard service that provides monthly e-mail reports of domain and trademark registrations closely resembling yours.