How and where to buy your domain name.

When we purchased our first domain name, over 10 years ago, it cost a lot more than domain names do today.  Hosting was also very expensive, costing us about a $100 per month, for a small website.  Gas prices may be soaring, but the price of domain names and web hosting is extremely reasonable.  How reasonable? You can buy a unique domain name for under $10.  You can also get a hosting account whose annual fee is less than our monthly web hosting fee  was ten years ago.
 
Some of you may ask, what is a domain name?  It is that address you type into the slender long  form box at the top of your browser, which takes you to a website.  It is the web address for your website.  For Yahoo it is yahoo.com and for Google it is google.com. 
 
When you decide to purchase a domain name, you will need to first see what is available. If someone has already bought the name you like, you’ll have to find another name.  To purchase a domain name, or to see if your desired name is available, click here, AFTER you finish reading this!.
 
When you click on the link I gave you in the previous paragraph, you will see a search form, that looks very similar to the picture below.  You will type in the name of your desired domain choice, and see if it is available.  You also have options of getting  non-.com domain names, such as .info or .net.

Before you buy a domain name, here are a couple of tips:

• Try to keep it simple.  The easier it is to remember, the better!

• Don’t use a trademark word.  Even if it happens to be available, the business who owns the trademark will eventually sic their attorneys on you.

• If you want to use two words, such as MY SITE, use my-site, and not mysite or my_site.  Search engines will better recognize the individual words when hyphened, as opposed to an underscore or all crammed together.