130 Serving Your Customers
Obtaining Domain Names
Before you publish a site on the Internet, you must register your unique domain name
with a domain name registration authority. A domain name is an easy-to-remember
web site address.
When you want to visit a web site, you enter a domain name (e.g. your-domain.com) or
a Uniform Resource Locator (e.g. http://www.your-domain.com) into your browser's
address bar. In order to show you the requested site, your browser first needs to find
out the IP address corresponding to the requested domain name because machines
address each other by IP addresses—domain names were devised for humans. So,
the browser queries the name servers in the distributed Domain Name System, which
translates the requested domain name to IP address and returns the IP address to the
browser. Finally, the browser connects to the web server at the specified IP address
and retrieves the web pages from there. Thus, to allow other users to find your site by
its domain name, you must register your domain name with the Domain Name System.
When choosing a domain name for your site, consider a word or combination of words
that is relevant to your business, brand name, or topic of interest. A domain name
should be easy to remember. If your domain name will comprise several words, you
may want to separate these words with hyphens: this will help search engines
distinguish between words, therefore, the users will be able to find your site faster.
To increase the chances to find your site for your customers, you may also want to buy
the non-hyphenated version of the same domain name, for example, yourdomain.com
and redirect it to your original domain - your-domain.com. To protect your domain
name, you may want to register it in different top level domains: your-domain.com,
your-domain.net. For a domain name comprising a single word that users can misspell
and type incorrectly, you may also want to purchase one or few misspelled versions of
your domain name that you will point to your original site. To give you a real life
example of how this can be: there is the Google search engine with a primary web site
address www.google.com. Knowing that people sometimes swap two adjacent letters
or type more letters than required, the three additional domain names pointing to the
original site were set up: www.gogle.com, www.goolge.com, and www.gooogle.com.
Once you have decided on the right domain name, you can register it with a domain
name registration authority, or ask your service provider to do that for you. Registration
cost varies among registrars (usually from 4 to 10 US dollars per year).
It is possible to register and manage domain names through Plesk, if your service
provider enabled this option.
To register a domain name through Plesk, click Register on your Home page. You
will be taken to MyPlesk.com website, where a simple step-by-step wizard will
guide you through the registration procedure.
To manage domain names through Plesk, click Manage on your Home page. You
will be taken to MyPlesk.com website, where you can log in and manage your
domain names.
