Anyone who searches for a domain registrar wants to get the best service for the best price. Often people think that means that customers must pay premium prices to get good, quality domain registration services. This simply is not true. Many cheap domain registration

companies offer very good service for affordable prices. Besides, the process is going to be the same whether you choose a cheap domain registration company or a more expensive registrar.

It is important to state that while all domains are created equal, all registrars are not. One domain will not be better than another. A customer can purchase mypersonaldomain.com at Network Solutions, Register.com, or CheapDomains.com. No registrar has exclusive access to a domain name that all other registrars do not have. However, registrars differ in the quality of service they offer. This fact will determine whether or not a consumer will choose cheap domain registration or not.

Some registrars offer very basic domain registration services. Others offer bonus features like a domain control panel, starter web page, email forwarding, domain locking, and technical support. It would seem that technical support would be a standard feature of domain registration. However, many companies do not offer technical support. Therefore, customers who are not very knowledgeable about domain registration must beware. Prices increase as customers choose domain registration packages with more and more features.

Cheap domain registration definitely does not suggest an inferior domain. It is important to remember that all domains are the same. The quality of service offered by the registrar is what makes the difference. While customers will find cheap domain registration companies, they may not receive the services offered by more expensive registrars. However, if the person seeking to register a domain does not need as many services, the cheapest route may be the best route.

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When you attempt to register a domain name, you must choose which top-level domain you will be using. The top-level domain (TLD) is actually the extension of the domain name. For example, the .com is the top-level domain or extension in yourdomain.com. Many people think that the extension is included for no specific purpose. This could not be further from the truth. The domain extension or TLD actually indicates what the kind of entity the domain belongs to. For business you always want to buy a domain name that ends in .com. Here is a list of the most common TLDs and what they are used for.

.COM – Anyone with a personal or commercial site may buy a domain name with this extension. However, it is most commonly used by commercial entities. It is, by far, the most popular web domain extension and also the most valuable.

.NET – This is another general TLD, but it is mostly companies involved in internet communications and infrastructure buy a domain name with this extension.

.ORG – Buy a domain name with this extension and you are likely to operate some type of organization. Mostly non-profits register this type of domain.

.BIZ – Since .com has become so crowded with names, many business are registering this domain extension. It still reflects a commercial identity and allows you the opportunity to purchase your company name if it was already used under the more prevalent .com extension. Personal web sites may not use this extension.

.INFO – This top-level domain is steadily rising in popularity. If you have a personal or commercial web site, you can buy this domain name extension.

.PRO – Doctors, lawyers and other professionals buy this domain name extension when they are ready to display web sites with information about themselves and their occupations.

.COOP – This TLD is used by organizations that want to denote their status as cooperatives.

.NAME – Individuals buy this domain name extension to promote their personal web sites It must be comprised of your first and last name.

.AERO – This is a new option for the air-transportation industry.

.MUSEUM – The domain name extension is self-explanatory. In case it’s not obvious, only official museums may use this TLD.

.EDU and .GOV – Both of these domain names are not available for public registration. Only educational institutions and government agencies respectively are allowed to use these domain extensions.

IMPORTANT: For commercial and business use you should concentrate on finding a .com name first. Numerous studies show that surfers will consistently type .com into their browsers before any other extension. If you own MySite.net but your competition owns MySite.com then you will lose hard earned business. This is why .com names are so valuable and why NameSeek deals almost exclusively in the .com TLDs.

Once you own your .com name then you can acquire the .net, .biz, etc. names to keep those names from your competitors. You can point all your names to one web site.

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A Domain is where you hang out. If you hang out in New York City then NYC is your domain. In computer jargon a domain is the network where your computer hangs out, either a local subnet or on the internet.

A domain is a group of networked computers that contain a common communication address and share common resources. Domains are based on a hierarchical naming scheme or a tree structure called the Domain Namespace. In a namespace, names are used to represent other types of information such as IP Numbers.

Computers use IP or Internet Protocol numbers to find each other in a network. These numbers typically look like 192.168.122.244. To make it easy on humans the IP numbers are given friendly names known as Domain Names. Yahoo.com and Google.com are domain names and are much easier to remember than 216.109.112.135

Networks use a distributed data base known as the Domain Name System to translate the human friendly names into IP numbers computers can use. Computers will query other computers known as Name Servers to translate the domain names to numbers. The whole Domain Name System is designed to be transparent to the end user. The only thing the user has to remember is the Domain Name of the site they wish to visit.

NameSeek makes it easy for website owners and entrepreneurs to find exciting and memorable names that will bring business and traffic to your domain again and again.

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The quick answer to this question is that there is no difference between the two addresses for most modern domains. For example, typing www.eg.vg or eg.vg into the Uniform Resource Locator (URL) of your Web browser will bring you to this site with equal ease. However, leaving “www” off of some websites can result in the browser being unable to find the site. This problem is correctable by the domain holder. A cursory understanding of how the World Wide Web (WWW) works will be helpful in understanding the problem.

The Internet is a massive network of computers that communicate by using agreed upon protocols. For example, every computer on the Internet is assigned a unique numerical address so that information can be sent and received without being lost. These unique addresses are called Internet Protocol addresses, or IPs for short. In the case of a website the numeric IP maps to a name, as names are easier for surfers to remember than numbers.

The Domain Name System (DNS) database contains a record for each website, which stores the website's name and IP address. When clicking on a link or entering an address in a Web browser, it sends a request to the DNS database to resolve the name to the corresponding IP address. If the “www” prefix is left off and the browser stalls, it is likely that the DNS record does not contain the short version of the domain name: the version without the “www.”

Once the name is found in the DNS database it is resolved to the corresponding IP. This allows the browser to create a connection with the server that hosts the site. It requests the page and supplies your IP address, akin to sending a self-addressed stamped envelope. The host server sends the webpage to your computer and the transaction is complete.

In the past many host servers created websites as subdomains under www., following then-current naming conventions. "WWW" identified the server as a Web server, versus a server dedicated to other tasks. As the Internet became more widely traveled by the general public, however, the ubiquitous “www” was often overlooked when entering website addresses into browsers. This resulted in lost website traffic and frustrated surfers, as many DNS records only contained www.example.com, and not example.com for the domain name.

Over time hosts began dropping the “www” designation for Web servers, and domains were created as example.com. To catch traffic that might arbitrarily include “www” in the browser request, DNS records instead included an extra entry to cover this occurrence. CNAME is the DNS tag that maps an alias to the main name in the DNS record: in this case the "www." version of the name. With this solution surfers could include or exclude www. and reach the site either way.

DNS records can be modified to include a mapped alias. If you require this service for your domain(s), contact your domain registrar.

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Bandwidth is a term used to describe how much information can be transmitted over a connection. Bandwidth is usually given as bits per second, or as some larger denomination of bits, such as Megabits per second, expressed as kbit/s or Mbit/s. Bandwidth is a gross measurement, taking the total amount of data transferred in a given period of time as a rate, without taking into consideration the quality of the signal itself.

Throughput can be looked at as a subset of bandwidth that takes into account whether data was successfully transmitted or not. While the bandwidth of a connection might be quite high, if the signal loss is also high, then the throughput of the connection will remain somewhat low. Conversely, even a relatively low-bandwidth connection can have a moderately high throughput if the signal quality is also high.

Bandwidth is most familiar to consumers because of its use by hosting companies or internet service providers. The sense in which bandwidth is used by most web hosting companies, that is, as a measure of total data transferred in a month, is not strictly correct. This measurement is more rightly referred to as data transfer, but the use of bandwidth by hosting companies is so pervasive that it has become accepted by the general public.

Many hosting providers place caps on the amount of bandwidth a site can transfer in a given period of time, usually a month, but sometimes twenty-four hours or a week. If the site exceeds its bandwidth allotment, the service is usually either suspended or else additional bandwidth is billed separately, often at a much higher cost than the base cost included with the hosting plan.

Some hosts offer so-called unlimited bandwidth plans, which in theory have an unlimited amount of data transfer per month. Usually the actual bandwidth, that is the per-second transfer of a connection, is somewhat limited on these services, ensuring data transfer for the site never becomes too large. If the bandwidth limit is met, speeds for users may be throttled down substantially, or service may even be interrupted.

Different technologies for connecting to the internet have different bandwidth limits associated with them, as well. These act as an upper limit to how much data may be transferred each second by a user. At the low end of the bandwidth spectrum, a simple dialup connection, using a modem and a normal phone line, has a maximum bandwidth of around 56 kbit/s. In comparison, a DSL connection can reach nearly 10 Mbit/s, or two-hundred times that of a dialup connection, while a cable connection can theoretically reach around 30 Mbit/s. Connections such as a T1 line can reach 1.544 Mbit/s, but given their dedicated nature the actual bandwidth they reach is often higher than cable or DSL. Larger connections include T3 at around 43 Mbit/s, OC3 at 155 Mbit/s, OC12 at 622 Mbit/s, and the monumental OC192 at 9.6 Gbit/s, more than three-hundred times faster than a cable connection as its maximum speed.

Bandwidth is also a limiting factor for the technology that connects the computer itself to the modem or device interacting with the direct internet line. Basic Ethernet, for example, has a bandwidth of 10 Mbit/s, so that using an internet connection faster than that would be largely wasted speed. Fast Ethernet has a bandwidth of 100 Mbit/s, more than fast enough for all consumer uses, while Gigabit Ethernet has a bandwidth of 1 Gbit/s and 10 Gigabit Ethernet is 10 Gbit/s. Wireless technologies are also limited by bandwidth, with Wireless 802.11b featuring a bandwidth of 11Mbit/s, Wireless-G 802.11g having a 54 Mbit/s cap, and Wireless-N 802.11n a blazing 300Mbit/s.

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The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is a non-profit corporation located in Marina Del Rey, California tasked with managing the logistics of Internet Protocol (IP) addresses and domain names. Created in September 1998, ICANN took over these duties previously served by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA). As recently as September 2006 ICANN renewed its agreement with the U.S. Department of Commerce (DOC) to continue in this capacity.

Every computer than connects to the Internet must have a unique address in order to issue requests and receive information within the Internet. When a user logs on to the Internet, the Internet Service Provider (ISP) assigns an IP address. ISPs are assigned blocks of proprietary IP addresses for their use. The IPs they assign to their customers are pulled from these blocks.

In addition to every computer online having a unique address, every website must also have a unique address. The domain name is only used as a convenience because names are easier for people to remember than a string of numbers, but each name maps back to a specific IP address. In the case of wiseGEEK.com, for example, the IP address is 69.93.118.236. Considering the vast number of Internauts and websites, it becomes clear that ICANN has a formidable job in managing the global coordination of this crucial aspect of the Internet.

Over time new domain hierarchies became necessary to answer demand. Thanks to ICANN, standard .com, .net and .org addresses were joined by extensions .info, .name, .tv and .museum among others. The travel industry got its own hierarchy with .travel, and websites dedicated to employment opportunities could populate the .jobs hierarchy. ICANN also manages IPs assigned to government offices (.gov), military (.mil), and country code hierarchies (e.g. .uk).

ICANN operates through a board of stakeholders who regularly meet to discuss policy development to better serve the needs of the Internet. It coordinates resources from a variety of bodies within ICANN that include the Address Supporting Organization (ASO), the Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO), and the Country Code Names Supporting Organization (CCNSO). Input also comes from the At-Large Advisory Committee (ALAC), the Security and Stability Advisory Committee (SSAC), the Root Server System Advisory Committee (RSSAC), the Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC), and the Technical Liaison Group (TLG). Each of these bodies within ICANN addresses specific areas required for effective overall management of the global assignment of domain names and IP addresses.

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