How To Get A Domain For Your Website

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What’s a Domain? And How To Get One?

Hey this is Don Archer again. In the videos leading up to this one I showed you how to create and edit a video, how to create a YouTube account, and how to upload your video to your YouTube account. But now that you have a video you need a place, besides YouTube, to display it. That’s where a website comes in. But before you can have a website you need to have a few things in place.

Ok really there are just four things that you need to have in place in order have a website

  • You need to choose a domain name for your site. That’s what this video is about.
  • You need to have your site hosted
  • You need to choose a platform to build your site on
  • And you need to set up and customize your site

Sounds like quite a bit but don’t let it overwhelm you. It’s not hard and doesn’t cost a lot of money. You only need to pay for 2 of them, the domain name and hosting, and at most, it’ll cost $50 a year, the other two things you can easily do yourself.

Simply put a domain is your website’s address and, in order to make your company easily searchable and give you more credibility, you should seek to have your company name match the name of your website.

If you can’t secure the exact same name then you have two options. You can change the name of your company to match an available domain name or you can find a domain name that’s closely related to your company name.
For example: if the name of your company is Bill’s Towing you might have a hard time getting that one. Instead of Bill’s Towing.com, try putting the name of the city or area where you operate after your company name- like: Bill’sTowingHouston.com.
The shorter and easier to remember, the better.

To get a domain you need to go to a Domain Name Registrar and buy one. There’s Godaddy, Bluehost, HostGator, 123cheapdomains, Dreamhost and many others. The cost ranges from $9.95 to $35 per year. Most registrars allow you to pay for up to 5 years at one time and they’ll remind you when you need to renew.

I like Dreamhost.com because they don’t bombard you with a bunch of ads and confusing material like Godaddy. Don’t get me wrong I use Godaddy to host some of my sites but I like the simplicity that Dreamhost offers. And besides being simple to use, they offer a one-click install for WordPress.

And WordPress is the platform (Step3) that I suggest you use. So whatever host you choose be sure that they offer WordPress as a one-click install.

Ok I’m going to show you how to search for a domain on just two of the registrars. Let’s first go to 123 Cheapdomains.com and perform a search.