Domain name registration

Domain name registration is easy and cheap. First of course, you have to decide what domain name you want. Today this can be a problem - a great many domain names you might think of are already taken. Some of these are taken by legitimate sites, but annoyingly many sites may be instances of domain parking (or variants like cybersquatting or typosquatting). Still, you have to come up with something - I chose squidsquid because it seemed catchy (a lot of variants like giantsquid.com, megasquid.com, bluesquid.com etc are already in use).

Many hosts offer "free" registration as part of their hosting package. However, you should consider registering your domain name independantly. This is because if you let your host do it, you cannot be sure what information they will enter in the WHOIS. For all practical purposes, whoever's information is in the whois owns that domain (you can check who owns any domain by running a whois and entering checkdomain.com). If your host enters their own information they might pressure you to stay with them, or there might be complications if they go out of business. So for piece of mind, I recommend registering your domain name yourself. Then when you sign up with a host, you just need to change the DNS servers to point at your host, which is pretty easy.

There are many specialist companies for domain registration - I ended up going with namecheap. It cost only $8.88 USD for 1 year, the process was quick and easy and I have no complaints.