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Registering your domain

Honestly, this should have been the first step.  But this tutorial has taken on a life of its own and is covering areas that I hadn’t intended when I first sat down.

Registering the domain
So, we need BobSmithPhotography.net to show Bob’s website.  This seems to be one of the most confusing parts for people new to building web sites.  

First, a little background
Your computer doesn’t know that BobSmithPhotography.net is actually sitting on a computer in New Jersey.  And really, it doesn’t need to know.  All your computer needs to know is how to make a request to BobSmithPhotography.net when you type it into your browser.  It just needs to know who to ask; probably your cable modem, DSL, or dial-up provider.  It's up to them to figure out how to get from your computer to Bob's web server.  

The first thing your computer does is get the address to BobSmithPhotography.net.  This is called a DNS lookup.  (DNS = Domain Name System for next time you’re at a party with web nerds)  Your computer sends out a DNS request and gets back an IP address.  So now, instead of looking for BobSmithPhotography.net your computer is looking for 65.98.78.15.  Isn’t BobSmithPhotography.net a lot easier to remember?  

Now your computer sends a request out to the server at 65.98.78.15 and requests a file.  The server sitting in New Jersey gets that request and sends the file back to you.  This particular server actually has several addresses and each may have more than one domain, but that’s a little deeper than we need to go for this conversation.

Registering the domain
Yesterday I actually went and registered BobSmithPhotography.net and set it up on my server.  I probably should have taken some screen captures along the way, but it really isn’t that difficult of a process.

Some hosts will register domains for you, and while this is the quickest way to get up and running I would suggest against it unless you have a host that you trust.  Some hosts will register your domain name in their name.  Not really a problem until the host becomes unreliable or raises rates and you decide to leave.  Then you’d be at their mercy whether they’ll let you have the domain or not.  If you register the domain yourself it’s yours and if you want to change hosts it’s a simple matter of plugging in new values to the registrar.

First we need to pick a registrar.  A registrar is a company that is allowed to map domain names to IP addresses.  There are only a few out there, although there are several resellers as well.  When I registered my first domain there was only one registrar, NetworkSolutions, and they charged $35 a year for a domain.  Now that there is competition domain prices have dropped to about 9 bucks.  I’m using GoDaddy now.  The only downside I’ve found with them is that they make you look through a lot of ads to sign up for your domain.  But other than that, they’ve been great.

When you go to the registrar’s site you will see some type of box allowing you to check for the availability of a domain.  Your best bet is to have a dozen or so possible domains that you would be willing to work with because odds are very good that you will not get your first choice.  Generally a dot-com is better than a dot-net which is better than a dot-biz or dot-info.  My thinking is that if you can get a longer dot-com compared to a shorter dot-net, you should go for it.  Unfortunately there was already a BobSmithPhotography.com, so Bob had to go with the dot-net.

If you do not have a host already this is the time to sign up.  After you sign up with a host they will give you settings for your Name Server – it will probably be something like ns1.myhost.com and ns2.myhost.com.  Some hosts give you more than 2, but you must have at least 2.  

Take those name server addresses back to your registrar.  On your account page there will be a place to enter them for the domain you just purchased.  Go ahead and enter as many name server addresses as your host gave you and save it.  You probably will have to take out the name servers that the registrar put in by default. 

There is another option, and that is free web hosting.  Many companies will allow you to host your site with them for free in exchange for advertisements that are placed on your site.  While not ideal for a photographer's web site, it may be a good way for you to get your feet wet without being out any money.  Robert Watcher put a tutorial up on ProPhotoForum explaining how to do this with Netfirms.  One caveat, Netfirms does not allow PHP on their free hosting, so many of the tricks we've done on Bob's site with PHP would not work.  In fact, that's why I registered the domain separately.  Originally I was going to put this site on Netfirms as a free account. 

And we wait
Due to the way the internet works, this is not an instant change.  It takes time for every computer in the world to know that BobSmithPhotography.net now points to 65.98.78.15.  It used to be 72 hours was the standard, but it has gotten quicker.  About half an hour is what I normally find.  

Ok Ryan, sum it up for me in one sentence
It'll be a run-on, but here goes.

Find a registrar, register your domain, find a host, get your name servers, plug the name servers in at your registrar, and wait.  

Next…
We’ll get back to the design part of this tutorial.  I just realized I skipped a step and needed to go back.