Domain names

Domain names have begun to be highly coveted by companies because the ones most easy to remember can bring potential customers to a site.  CNN June 5 1997, commenting on the sale of "business.com" for $150,000 (£95,000).

Q - Why do we need Domain names?
A - Each World Wide Web site needs an 'address' so it can be found on the Internet. Computers, being computers, recognise sites by their IP number. Humans, being humans, find it easier to remember a name rather than a string of numbers. To make life easier, instead of  using the IP number of a web site as it's address, we allocate each number a Domain Name.  As each Domain Name is allocated to one number, and every site has its own number, a Domain Name is unique and can be registered only once.   There is, therefore, only one DomainNames.com

Q - I only want a domain name as my email address - is this possible?
A - Yes it is - and many of our clients register their names for this reason. For more details take a look at our page on email information page.

Q - How do I register my own domain name?
A - By using our on-line registration form we hope! It is possible to register with the various naming authorities yourself, but be aware - the necessary forms can be daunting, and to register a name you must have two named servers which are permanently connected to the Internet. (normally only Internet Services Providers have these). As with most jobs in life, it's far more sensible to leave it to the experts and pay them for their expertise!

Q - Once registered is the Domain Name mine for life?
A - Yes, providing you pay the annual renewal fee to the regulating authority

Q - Can I register anything as my domain name?
A - Yes …… and no. Theoretically you can register anything, in practice there are restrictions; for example: If the name you have chosen is already registered (rather like company names, they cannot be duplicated). You cannot register names already registered as copyright i.e. McDonalds: You cannot use words likely to cause offense or that are abusive. Words of less than three letters are normally refused registration.

Q - Can I register more than one domain name?
A - For UK names (.co.uk, .co.org, etc) and US names (.com, .org etc) you can register as many as you wish. 

Q - I have seen domains ending in .com, .org etc, what's this all about?
A - in a nut-shell, these suffixes are issued by the various registering authorities around the world. The most common are those of the USA. The regulatory body for US registrations is the InterNIC. The following are their most common suffixes.

.COM Designed for commercial entities. .com rapidly became the top-level domain for business. Today, anyone can register a Web Address in the .com domain.

.EDU is for 4-year, degree granting colleges/universities.

.NET Designed for organisations directly involved in Internet operations, such as network providers and network operation centres. Today, anyone can register in the .net domain.

.ORG Designed for miscellaneous organisations, including non-profit groups. Today, anyone can register in the .org domain.

Q - If the name I want has already been registered, can I buy it?
A - Yes there are organizations which facilitate the sale and purchase of existing Domain Name registrations. They may sell on behalf of the owner, or could have registered domains themselves and are now selling them on (you had to be in early to get the best ones!).

Q - Do I have to register my own domain name to have a web site?
A - No. Many smaller organisations may not feel it necessary to register their own name. They can still have a presence on the Internet by using an URL offered by a service provider.

Q - Why register a domain name - Two good reasons
A - To keep ahead of your competitors. By registering your own domain name and using a personalised email address you will be one step ahead of your competitors and will impress your clients and suppliers with your professional presence on the Internet.  To secure it for future use (before someone else does). You should secure a good domain name now even if you are not ready to use it. Nearly 17,000 names are registered every day. Any delay may result in you losing out on your ideal name and having to settle for something less appropriate in the future.

Many names are registered  for clients who have no intention of using the name on a web site - they simply want the name to use as an email address. Technically this is easy for us to facilitate, we simply host the name on our servers and forward any email addressed to it to the clients ISP email address. Should the client change their ISP they simply inform us of the new address and we re-direct the forwarding. It is rather like having a PO box for your post. Any letters addressed to the PO Box are re-directed to your home address, if you move house the PO Box remains the same and post is sent to your new home address.  If the main use of the name is for an email address then this should be taken into account when choosing the Domain Name to register. The main considerations are:

that the name is always used after @
the name is used extensively in print ie on business cards
the address is frequently given verbally
what is going before the @ - long/short, formal/informal etc

It may sound simplistic, but the best way to check potential names is to put them to the test in practice. You will need to enlist the help of a willing friend or associate to help - if they laugh too much you have chosen the wrong Domain Name!

How does the address sound? - say it out load, is it easy clearly understood?
How does it look? - mock-up letter heads/business cards etc
Is it easy to remember? - test it on your friends, tell them your email address and then ask them to repeat it 30 minutes later
Be objective, get the opinion of others, after all it is someone else who will use your address, not you.

Email Forwarding
Email forwarding requires you to have connection to the internet and your own domain name. It does not replace the email address supplied by an Internet service provider, (E.g. AOL or Compuserve); it duplicates it with a more appropriate name. Any mail to the new address is forwarded into the existing mailbox.

Multiple email forwarding For most individuals and organizations multiple email forwarding is a flexible option. This ignores everything before the @ sign, so that a company can give out a variety of email addresses such as sales, info or any number of individual names. As long as the correct domain name after the @ sign is used all mail will be forwarded to the specified email address. This service costs $50 per year. There are many advantages of email forwarding including:
An email address can reflect the nature or name of your business but does not advertise your Internet Service Provider.
A name that is easy to remember and is accessible from anywhere in the world without the need for international, national or local dialling codes.  It is impossible to tell how large a company is based upon either domain name or email address. But since both can be used on company stationary the impression given is of a well-established business.

Flexibility for the domain holder to change ISP or the physical location of the company without interruption to email services.

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Choosing a Domain Name is an art,
not a science - therefore we can offer advice, but not a strict formula which will work every time. We hope that this page will give you an introduction to that art. There are several issues to consider before you register your own Domain Name First off - what characters can be used to form a Domain Name? Only alphanumeric characters and punctuation marks may be used, the choice, therefore, is from:
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0  dash (-)

An address must begin and end with an alphanumeric character. Punctuation characters must not be placed together  NOTE - Domain Names are NOT case sensitive  Global Domain names (.com .net .org) MUST be less then 26 characters this includes the 4 characters .com. Domain names can contain letters, numbers or hyphens(-) NO spaces or other characters are allowed. Two character domain names can only be registered if they are a registered trade mark of that company (e.g. BT.com is registered Trade Mark of British Telecom).  We would advise around 15 as a maximum. Using a zero is allowed, though we would caution you about it being confused with the letter 'O'.  In general when picking a name, "less is more", in other words a short name is preferable to a long one. However, if your organisation is "Stafford and Johnson   Associates" you have little choice. If the organisation's name is commonly abbreviated then that may work - consider the National Basketball Association for example, they made the right decision in registering NBA.com.

Some suggestions for "Stafford and Johnson Associates" might be:
SandJ-Associates.com
SJAssociates.com
SandJassoc.com
SJassocs.com
S-JAssociates.com
Stafford-Johnson.com
Stafford-and-Johnson.com
StaffordJohnson.com
StaffordandJohnson.com
SandJ.com
SandJAssociates.com

(NB We have made up this organisation as an example - if there is such an firm out there, prove it and we'll give you a Domain Name!)

This is not an exhaustive list, but it should give you an impression of the possibilities. Considerations are many, but there are two main factors How easy is the name to use / remember?  How is the name aesthetically? - how good/bad does it look in print, on say, a business card or corporate brochure?  Don't forget you may use your Domain Name for your email address as well! (we give more advice for email addresses on the email-info page. Depending on your priorities it is worth considering having one Domain Name for your web site and another for your email address. 

A serious consideration for businesses is that your Domain Names is likely to be the first contact prospective customers and/or suppliers will have with your company - and you know what they say about "first impressions".  In our example it is unlikely there are many, if any, organisations with the same name. However if there are other organisations with a similar name to your own, (don't forget we are talking world wide here) they may have got the best one first - there's a warning here, act now so it's you that gets first choice!  If your first choice name has gone, or your trading name does not lend itself to being a Domain Name, you may consider a generic name. Be aware that the best have already gone, but that should not stop you giving this idea some thought.

As an example we recently registered a Domain Name for a pharmacy which operates in the community, so they now have Community-Pharmacy.com for their web site. The same organisation's forward thinking introduces another aspect to Domain Name registration; that of multiple registrations for your organisation. That same "Community-Pharmacy" has also registered it's retail trading and holding company names. Ok you're now saying "what's the point?" - other than to give DomainNames.com three times the money.  The answer is this. I stated above that your Domain Name is likely to be your first point of contact for other organisations, so what if you trade in several different markets, or segments of markets, and in each of those markets you want to present a specific image?  Let's consider No Name Autos of No-Place, part of No Name inc. They have a bargain lot to sell off traded cars, a dealership for new compacts and they also specialise in imported sports cars. Same business, three different markets. The chances are they would have only one web site with different pages devoted to the different products on sale. The problem is that a web site under the URL of NoNameAutos.com is unlikely to attract some seeking a Toyota MR2, it is too bland to target specific markets. Consider the following; all Domain Names will 'point' to the same web site but each will be used independently when marketing the web site, be that on search engines, printed-media advertising or business cards for the sales staff.
NoNameAutos.com - the 'corporate' name Budget-Autos.com - for the traded used cars Quality-Compacts.com
- the compact dealership Imported-Sports.com or Exotic-Motors.com
- the imported sports cars NoName-Ltd.com - the email address when dealing with overseas clients

A total of five names, at five times the cost certainly, but compared with other marketing costs, very little to create five 'different' entities on the Internet.   (NB Once again I made up the names above, if anyone is using them on the Net, my compliments on your choice!) Hopefully this page has given you food for thought, if you are having difficulty deciding on the most appropriate Domain Name for your organisation email details of the name and what business/markets you are in and we will send you our recommendation for you to consider - at no charge of course.

 

Domain Names - what, why, and who - a brief background.
We have tried to keep this section relatively simple, though that is not always possible in what is a rather complex subject area. For the sake of trying to avoid confusing readers (or putting them to sleep) some lesser issues are by-passed. Please be aware that although this narrative has been thoroughly researched, it is merely our view of the situation and should not be taken as a definitive work on the subject. It is worth pointing out at this point that during our research we found that some versions of events contained bias depending on the writers view point. We have tried to avoid this. The Internet operates on a system of Top Level Domains (TLDs) which include .net, .org .edu, .mil, and .int and .com. The latter of these is considered top-dog and browsers default to them if you leave out the suffix. It is the .com's about which there have been ownership 'disagreements'. Indeed the phenomenal growth of commercial sites using .com is the source of current problems and disagreements in 'Domain Name Land'.

Up-dated lists of TLDs are created each day and sent out to root nameservers. The number of these nameservers varies, a minimum of nine is the norm, as I write this it is 13, last month it stood at 15. They are based mainly in the US but they can also be found in Japan and Europe. It is these nameservers which effectively

determine the Net's naming convention - if they don't recognise your TLD you are no-where. Remote nameservers use replications of the root nameservers files to access sites and so keep Internet traffic flowing. As well as the US there are around 250 country specific TLDs. Common examples are .UK and .au for the United Kingdom & Australia and .jp for Japan. (We list them all on our Worldwide pages). Each country has an appointed registrar who keeps their 'country' lists on their own root nameserver. As these registrars have no governing body each has it's own rules and regulations with regard to the issue of their TLDs- - not least on their naming conventions. Many countries issue 'sub' domains based on their TLD; in the UK for example you can be .co.uk, .net.uk, .org.uk etc whereas in France all come under .fr.  So the system works something like this: (please remember this page tries to keep things simply - we know the following is technically naive)  You enter an URL into your browser  your local cache is checked first, if it's not there;
-  it goes to your ISP, if it's not there;
-  it is passed to your local registrar's nameserver, if it's not there;
- off it goes to one of the TLD root nameservers, which;
- passes you to the exact nameserver which holds the DNS for the URL which you want

This hierarchical system works well as it reduces the strain on root nameservers by spreading the load. However the registrars for the .com are taking a high percentage of that strain, which brings us to their story Once upon a time, oh well it was in 1993, Network Solutions Inc. (NSI) were appointed to handle the management of the US TLDs. At that time this involved registering around 200 domain names a month, and a fixed fee was agreed. Enter the domain name 'gold rush' and about the same time the take over of NSI by

Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC). Because SAIC held a number of contracts with the government (and employed ex US service employees) opinions soon surfaced about SAIC being in the pay of the US government - much to the chagrin of "independent" naming companies who interpreted the situation as NSI being given the monopoly for registering the main TLDs.

The plot thickened when, in September 1995, sanctioned by the National Science Foundation (NSF), NSI started charging a fee for each name registered. The reasoning behind this seems two-fold:

1.NIS were now registering some 125,000 name a month, and the fixed fee agreed in 1993 wasn't even covering their expenses.
2.The NSF saw, and took, the opportunity to reduce its budgets.
The NSF announced that a tax of 30% on each fee was to be levied, these monies to be "placed into an interest bearing account that will be used for the preservation and enhancement of the intellectual infrastructure of the internet". The money, around $35,000,000, is still in that bank account. Local naming registrars have pointed to this as another reason for their dissatisfaction with the situation.

This dissatisfaction went ballistic when, in June 1997, the whole Internet collapsed, the blame landing squarely at the feet of NSI. (the updated list of TLDs went out corrupted). Further fuel was added to their fire by NSI's floatation on the stock market, oh yes there was also the dispute over the ownership of the .com whois - effectively the control of .com TLDs.

The independent Net community countered with a number of committees which eventually produced a memorandum proposing a major over-haul of the naming system, including the introduction of seven new TLDs. As well as the new names, the system would introduce 28 new registrars to control the new, and existing, TLDs.

So that's the plot so far, (or at least the abridged version) what can we look forward to in the next series? Well, D-day is set to be in April 1998, when the licence given to NSI runs out, but what will happen no one yet knows, or even what twists the plot will take in the mean time. Some questions you may well want to ask:
Q Can I register the new names yet?
A Some organisations are taking advance orders (and your cash!). We have concerns. If all 28 new registrars take a 'booking' for, say, domainnames.web
-who gets it? If it is 1st come 1st served there will be a real battle at zero hour on D-day!
Q If I do register a 'new' name when can I use it?
A Next year, sometime. Could be January, could be September. There is not yet a guarantee that they will come into existence. No one really knows.
Q How much will a 'new' name cost?
A No announcement has been made. It may vary from registrar to registrar, users could benefit from a price war, or suffer at the hands of an oligopoly.
Q What's going to happen to my .com?
A It will always be there.
Q If I have a .com name does this entitle me to the same name with the 'new' suffixes?
A 'Fraid not.
Q Will there be anymore 'new' names
A Possibly - even the seven named are not yet confirmed. There is a proposal for .xxx for sex sites.
As previously stated this should not be taken as definitive comment on the Domain Names situation as it stands, it is merely our interpretation of events. We will up-date the information as events dictate. If you feel we have presented an untruth in any way please email us stating the relevant section and the evidence on which you are basing your contention.