Friday, June 13, 2008

Domain cost

You can register a .com domain name with several very reputable registrars for, say, $6.99/yr to $9.99/yr. Fees for registering the other possibilities, .info, .co.uk, .net, .org, .biz, .tv can range from $0.99 per year to whatever the registering company wants to charge.

But is it going to be worth it? And where do you stop with the combinations? .com, .co.uk, .info and then there's the 'do I add a dash ( - ) just-to-be-on-the-safe-side.com, .org, .biz' ? I would say, probably not. The .com brand is so widely known that most people will automatically type in a .com extension on any website they are trying to find.


Private Registration

This option will keep your private details, name, physical address and email address unavailable to anyone checking the ownership of your domain on "Whois". Internet law requires that all information about domain registration be publicly available and "Whois" maintains the databases that hold this information.

If you buy a private registration, your details will not be available to just anyone who wants to check your domain for specific ownership. There are many domain owners who don't think this is necessary but, on the other hand, private registration can help you avoid spam, crank emails and unwanted phone calls.

It is worth bearing in mind that any emails you send from the US that are commercial in nature, like:

i) Promoting a product or affiliation
ii) Suggesting that the reader visit your sales page
iii) Offering a discount for purchasing some product

are required, by the US Can-Spam Act, to have your correct, physical mailing address visible to your email recipients and the correct email address you sent the advertisement from, so this kind of defeats the object of private registration in some ways.

Protected Registration

This form of domain registration protects you from inadvertent expiration of your domain registration, including credit card expiration, failed billing or outdated contact information. It also makes it more difficult to accomplish most malicious domain transfers by Internet predators. Effectively, your domain would be held for you until you renewed the registration.

It can cost more than $25 a year for this service, depending on who you are using for this protection. If you are a small marketing venture, selling a piece of software, an affiliate product or an ebook on a niche product, you may not need this upsell. However, if later your domain starts making lots of money, and you decide that you do need it, you can easily add it.

Business Registration

This level of domain registration keeps need-to-know information about your business in the Whois database. That information can include a map to your store, website photo, business description, phone number and links to vital pages of your website.

The vital information your customers might need to facilitate business deals with your business is visible to millions of searchers in the Whois domain name database.

Do you need it? That would depend on the nature and size of your business and your budget. This would be more of a marketing/budget decision. A small, start-up website selling one ebook would probably not need this additional service.

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