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Domain Registration

Registering A Domain;
When you register a domain, there are essentially four blocks of information that you will be asked for.

Registrant: The registrant is the registered owner of your domain name. You can use your own name as the registrant, or you can use the name of your company as the registrant.

Administrative Contact:The administrative contact is the name of the person that has control over your domain name, and will be asked permission to make any changes to your registration agreement.

Technical Contact:The technical contact has no control over your domain, but may be given secondary access to make changes, with final approval coming from the administrative contact. This allows you to have your website designer or hosting company take care of issues like DNS server listings, etc., with final approval coming from you.

Billing Contact:The billing contact is the person responsible for paying the yearly renewal fees for your domain.

DNS Servers:DNS stands for Domain Name System. The Domain Name System is a system that allows you to "point" your domain to the server it will be hosted on. If you are filling in your own domain name registration form, simply ask your web host for the DNS server information so that you can enter it when you register your domain name.

Your Domain Name Registrar;
Your registrar is the company that you will file your domain name registration with. A company can not just decide to sell domain names. There is process of application that a company must complete to be able to register domains.

Could you imagine the mayhem if anyone could accept domain name registrations without checking with a central source? Imagine if I registered the domain lindacaroll.com with my ISP in Canada, and someone registered it with their ISP in the USA, and yet another person registered the same domain with an ISP in the UK.

To prevent that kind of chaos, there are 13 root servers across the Internet that hold all domain registrations. Those 13 servers would collapse if they had to route all Internet traffic every time anyone in the world typed in a domain name.

So, when a new domain is registered, it is fed into all 13 "root servers." These root servers are updated every 24 hours, to add new domains registered and remove domains that expired.

From there, many, many "DNS" servers around the world download the information each time it is updated at the root server. Every Internet Service Provider, for example, regularly download the information from the root servers so that when you connect to the Internet through your ISP, you can be routed to the location of any website in the world by simply typing it into your browser.

A domain name registration company - called a "registrar" has the ability to add the domain names that you register to the root servers that control all domain names, world wide.

Back in the late ninties, Network Solutions was the only place that people could register a domain. They were the only approved registrar. Domains, then, cost $35 per year. Once domain registrations opened up to remove the monopoly, prices started to drop. Today, you can register a domain name for as low as $8.99 at places such as GoDaddy.com.

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