What should I know before I register a domain name?

In this post we will cover what all you need to know before going out and buying any domain name. Things that could save you tons of money before getting into any trouble and make your life easier.

Trademark issues.

As per IANA, anyone who’s registering a trade mark already registered by a brand. then you could get yourself sued over this and may even have to pay a penalty. So just make sure that the next name you are registering is not a already registered trademark. Main issue with this is, you won’t get noticed in your early days, but sooner your business starts flying, everyone will notice you and start to shelf you.

Domain Registrar

This is the company you will go to register your domain and all the stuff on this domain like – DNS manager, Contact details etc. They will charge you some money to register the domain. Choosing a domain registrar is very important as different companies provide different services and support. To have peace of mind, you should have a registrar who has a fully automated system and gives full control to you along with locking and unlocking domain and all the DNS controls. It should have clear and well defined domain policies with pre-defined expiry dates and mode of payment. You should be able to move your domain to any other registrar anytime. If you think you don’t have full rights and authorization code of your domain, then it’s time to change the domain registrar. You can transfer your domain to us and get a free 1 year extension to the domain.

DNS Manager

Mostly it’s a domain registrar, where you can go and manage all your DNS records. You may also use a free service of CDN (content delivery network) like Cloudflare, Maxcdn etc. Iwebslog provides free DNS manager with all domains and you have full authority over your domains and can manage all records at any time. This is the service that will help you configuring Emails (MS Records), Hosting (CNAME and A Records), Webmaster tools (TXT records), Sub-domains (CNAME Records) etc. Just make sure it’s reputed as DNS uptime is very crucial to your whole website discovery on internet.

Your Information

WHOIS database exposes all your contact information for all your domains and the name-servers, hosting etc. You should decide on this whether you want your information private or public in the database. You can use Private domain registration to use a intermediary service that will manage all the communication for you and display their information instead of you.

Type of Name – Generic / Brand

You should always prefer a brand name, as compared to generic name. Like medicine.com vs gsk.com. In this case medicine.com won’t generate much value and it don’t even showcase your brand name value. It’s a very generic name. Even if you want, just buy the generic name but redirect it to your main brand domain name. Some examples of brands – Google, Apple, Microsoft, Biocon, Dominos, Dunkin Donuts, Pepsico, Berkishire etc.

Web-hosting Provider

This is the company who hosts your website on the internet. Just be careful when you select this, as the reputation of the servers is very important in your search engine rankings. You won’t like to host your website on a blacklisted server. The hosting provider should be reputed and have robust servers to handle sudden spikes in your views by allocating burstable resources. You can review our business hosting packages here, shared hosting services, VPS and dedicated servers.