Web Design and Web Hosting

Whois privacy can be a great service for a lot of reasons, but you need to be careful who it is done through.

When you register a domain name your contact information is published to the public whois database, so anyone can do a whois search on that domain and see your name, address, phone number and email address listed as the owner of the domain. Whois privacy puts in another companies information, usually associated with the registrar of the domain, so your information is not shown. They will usually forward on certified mail and email, but this is something you’ll want to check on before choosing your registrar.

One issue to be aware of, however, is that the company shown in the whois is often considered the owner of the domain. ICANN has done some things lately to try to fix this issue to protect the domain owners, but there is still a risk. A few years ago a registrar who gave out free privacy went out of business and it became nearly impossible to know which domains belonged to which customers because the only publicly available information showed all the domains as belonging to the registrar, which is now out of business.

It is also important not to try to take whois privacy into your own hands. If you put in fake information and somebody requests a whois verification (basically a request to see if the contact information on the domain is legitimate) and the registrar can’t reach you, then they are required to delete the domain.

A premium domain purchase is typically the purchase of the ownership rights to an existing domain name from the owner of the domain. It should be a one-time charge and after that you should have complete control over the domain and you should be able to move it to the registrar of your choice. That means that even if you pay $5000 for a domain, renewing the domain should still cost around $10/year.

Under current rules, domain names can be registered for up to 10 years into the future. That doesn’t mean you can only own the domain for 10 years, that just means that you can register for up to 10 years into the future at any given time. You can register for 10 years, then wait a year so it has 9 years left, then renew it for another year and keep it at 10 years.

Some registrars try selling longer registrations, but all they are really doing is getting your money up front and not actually registering the domain for as long as you pay them for. If they go out of business or you transfer your domain to another registrar you’d lose the extra time.

Having a good domain name can really help out a business. A domain name that is easy to spell, easy to remember, and makes sense can do the following, among other things:

Word of Mouth Marketing
The right domain can lead to more word of mouth marketing. If customers can easily spell and remember your website then they’ll be more likely to tell others and, just as importantly, the others they tell will actually be able to get there.

Easier Marketing
Like word of mouth marketing, the right domain can also make your marketing efforts more efficient. You have more bang for your buck with a domain that people can remember and that means fewer marketing dollars spent to get the customers to remember you. If you can increase your marketing efficiency a domain name can easily more than pay for itself.

Credibility
A great domain name can actually help you gain credibility with both customers and vendors. If the domain sounds like it took some investment people will take you more seriously, whereas if it was obviously a readily available $10 domain people have a sense that you don’t have much invested in your website.

To search a list of high quality domain names, we recommend Valuable Web Names, at VWNames.com.

ICANN stands for the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.

From their own site ICANN states:
“To reach another person on the Internet you have to type an address into your computer – a name or a number. That address has to be unique so computers know where to find each other. ICANN coordinates these unique identifiers across the world. Without that coordination we wouldn’t have one global Internet.

ICANN was formed in 1998. It is a not-for-profit public-benefit corporation with participants from all over the world dedicated to keeping the Internet secure, stable and interoperable. It promotes competition and develops policy on the Internet’s unique identifiers.”

In very simplified terms, ICANN is the organization that makes sure that wherever you are in the world if you type in a domain name it should end up at the website you typed in. They oversee the domain name system on a global scale, so a .com in not only a .com in the US, but also in Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia, etc.

Registrar, Registry, and Registrant are all domain name terms. Basically, they are the following:

Registry: A Registry is the back end provider at the root of a TLD (an domain such as .com, .net, .org, etc.). You cannot buy a domain directly from a Registry, they just operate the central database of domains. To buy a domain you have to go to a Registrar that is contracted with the Registry. A Registry has a contract with ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers – we’ll go into them in another post) to managed a TLD. A few examples of Registries are:
.com and .net: Verisign
.org: Public Interest Registry
.info: Affilias
.biz: NeuLevel

Registrar: A Registrar is a company where you go to register a domain name. They have to be ICANN accredited, meaning they are under contract to ICANN and pay ICANN fees and they demonstrate some basic competencies. Registrars have connections into the various Registries so if two different customers are trying to register the same domain at the same time, whatever Registrar gets the request into the Registry a split second ahead of the other gets the domain. Some examples of Registrars are:
TierraNet/DomainDiscover
GoDaddy
Network Solutions
Register.com

Registrant: A Registrant is the owner of a domain. It can be a person or a company, and any person who owns a domain is a registrant.

When it comes to choosing your domain name there are many things to consider. One of those is which TLD (top level domain) to use. A top level domain is what is to the right of the dot. WebDesignandWebHosting.com is a .com. Other options include .net, .org, .biz, .info, and .us. Every country as it’s own ccTLD (country code TLD), and some of these have been marketed with a different meaning. Some of the more popular are .tv, .cc, .bz, .me and .ws.

For the most part, one TLD is functionally the same as another. The major difference comes with branding. .Com is by far the best TLD for most brands. .Org tends to carry with it a label of not-for-profit. .Net also enjoys great recognition.

When you get to the other TLDs you start to have the issue of getting people to remember both parts of your domain. If you have a .com, then you get people to remember “WebDesignandWebHosting” and the .com is automatic in the minds of most people. If your site was WebDesignandWebHosting.cc, then you have the added challenge of getting people to remember “WebDesignandWebHosting” and “.cc”.

To summarize, as far as a computer is concerned there isn’t much difference between one TLD and another, but if you want to build your own brand then how people view the domain is far more important.

Yes. Even in this economy. So far this year dnjournal.com has reported 7 sales of at least $1,000,000. Also, it’s been said that most of the high end sales aren’t even reported and made public. dnjournal also reports 56 sales of $100,000 or more. Again, those are only the sales made public. The domain market is still strong, and good domain names still have a lot of value.

Domain names tend to have a lot of value because the can be like real estate. Each domain is unique and there is only one like it in the world. Two people can’t own WebDesignandWebHosting.com.

There are lots of ways to get an appraisal on a domain, and very few are very accurate. Any free appraisal is essentially useless because a domains value is based on human factors (how easy is it to spell, is it memorable, does it make sense) and those are almost impossible for a computer to accurately define. The free appraisals are all an automated script looking at a string of characters and trying to figure out what they say (if they even go that far) and basing a price off some very basic criteria. Those scripts look at how many characters are in the domain, if those are numbers or letters, or both. What TLD the domain is (com vs net vs org, etc.). How many words are in the domain (if it can even tell). Those are all minimally useful, but it takes a person to look at a domain and know if that would make a good brand. When it comes to figuring out the value of a domain, there is no substitute for an experienced person evaluating the domain by hand. One source that will give an appraisal and reasons for the appraisal is Valuable Web Names.

Registrars, like hosts, are difficult to distinguish in many areas – especially the areas they tend to talk most about. Price tends to be about the same at all the major registrars, give or take $1/year (less than 10 cents/month). They all tend to offer the same set of value added services, though sometimes they have different names for the same things (Frame forwarding is the same as URL Masking, for example). What really sets one registrar apart from another is a few key issues, such as:
-How do they handle renewals?
Some very popular registrars are horrible in this area, and most registrars are poor. Domain contracts are generally considered void upon the expiration date of the domain, although there is also a general expectation of a grace period after expiration. Some registrars limit that amount of time to a couple weeks.
-How is customer service?
Do they have phone support? Email support? Or, like some hosts, is it just a web form you have to fill out?
-Do they respect their customers?
You can tell a lot about this by the answers to the previous two issues. You can also tell by how they notify customers of expiring domains. Do they answer the phone promptly (or at all?) Are they helpful with questions?

One registrar we have found that does all of the above well is DomainDiscover. They give a grace period on renewals and even have extra protections built in. They have the best customer service in the industry, with 24/7 toll free phone support. They send renewal emails and make renewal phone calls. In short, they are the most complete registrar out there.