How to choose and buy a domain name

A domain name is the name of your website. Well known domain names include bbc.co.uk and amazon.co.uk. You need to come up with your own domain name and coming up with a good domain is certainly something you should think very carefully about.

Coming up with a good name

Your domain name should reflect the name of your business. It should be possible to determine the nature of the business from the domain name. Domain names should be:

• Short
• Easy to remember
• Easy to spell
• Reflect your business idea
• Not be an abbreviation
• Not contain hyphens

Brainstorm all your thoughts of a domain name on paper taking into account the above points.

Choosing the type of extension

Once you’ve thought of a name you need to decide on what extension to have. The most famous extension is the .com but there are lots of others to choose from, including .net, .org, .info and country specific ones such as co.uk for the UK, .fr for France and co.za for South Africa. There are also hundreds of new extensions such as .accountancy and .club and .hotels available. Maybe one of these will suit your business!

Checking domain availability

Go to https://www.ionos.co.uk/ to check for available domains.

 

How to buy a domain

Buying a domain is closely associated with signing up with a webhosting account which you'll need to host your website. Therefore we will discuss this in the next section.

Web hosting

A web hosting account is what enables the world to see your website. When they open their web browser and go to www.yournewwebsite.com they see your website and everything you have to offer. It also enables Google and other search engines to rank your site so it can appear in their search results. There are thousands web hosting companies around the world. Some are huge and host millions of websites. A quick search on Google will quickly identify who some of the major players are. Expect to pay no more than £10 per month for web hosting with your first year often heavily discounted.

MCS website is hosted with IONOS and we have also worked with GoDaddy and FastHosts. They all offer domain name hosting as well as website hosting for your website. We can help you choose the best web hosting package for your needs. Once this has been decided we can help you with the purchase of the domain name.

Who Owns Your Domain Name?

If you already own a website we'd like to ask you the following question - who owns your domain name?

Is it you or your web developer/ web design company

We hope it is owned by you and we'll explain why.

Why you should own your domain name

Your domain name is valuable and represents everything about your business in the online space. If your web developer / web design company purchased the domain for you as part of the initial setup of your project but the developer/company goes bust then you will be 'up the creek without a paddle.'

We recommend that you pay for the domain name yourself along with the web hosting package. This way you will always remain in control. You will be responsible for annual renewals of the domain name.