[nikstar101]

Hello,

I have decided to go into the scary world of making my own website. Its purely a personal thing, no business related items just for blogs, photos etc. So was wondering is there any difference in the Domain Name registration companies (except the price)? I plan to get a .com address and to use the space on my .Mac account to store (host?) the website on and from my investigations i can use buy a domain name and then change the cname record to .mac... and then everything just works.?

Are there any things or surprises that i should look out for. I imagine that i simply buy the domain name for say 2 years then at that time i either renew or just let it expire. Does it cost anything just to let it expire (no admin fees etc)??

Any advice you have would be really appreciated.

[jdcfsu]

In my experience you just look for the cheapest registrar around. I've never been charged an admin fee on top of the domain fee for any of the domains I've ever bought, but if you're concerned just read the user agreement. Some places will advertise a cheep domain price but in order to get that price you need a hosting plan as well so you'll want to keep a look out for that.

A cheep registrar that I recommend to everyone is 1and1.com (since you're in the UK they have 1and1.co.uk as well).

[drewprops]

Interesting question...
I've always been afraid of the SUPER cheap registrars, I mean, what happens if they go tits up? Who inherits the admin of your domain registration?

[nikstar101]

Oh yeah i forgot one question. If i do this what will be the web address of the sub pages (blogs.html). For example, if i were to say register mactest.com, link it to my .Mac account. When people typed in www.mactest.com and navigated to the blogs page, would it read www.mactest.com/blog.html or would it read www.homepage.mac.com/mactest/blog.html.

As i hoped it would say as mactest.com otherwise it would just look a tad crap.

Just to let you know, mactest is not my site, it was just a coincidence that it just so happens to be someones and the links actually work.

[Yonzie]

You can get redircts really cheap (or free). This would result in your second scenario.
If you want it to say "http://www.mactest.com" in the address bar, you need a slight bit of web space, which is used to make a frame, in which your .Mac website will be.
This has the unfortunate side effect that visitors will always see "http://www.mactest.com" in the address bar, so they can't copy the link easily.

You can't tie a domain to the .Mac account?

EDIT: What you want is masked domain forwarding.

[nikstar101]

Originally Posted by Yonzie You can't tie a domain to the .Mac account?

I am not sure i think that is what this cname thing it about, but i hoped someone else would have tried it out and could tell me what actually happens.

[Capella]

Here's another, closely-related question: can you tie multiple domains to a .Mac account? For example, if I wanted to have a set of pages under domainnumberone.net and another set under domainnumbertwo.com, is that possible?

[MagSafe]

Originally Posted by Capella Here's another, closely-related question: can you tie multiple domains to a .Mac account? For example, if I wanted to have a set of pages under domainnumberone.net and another set under domainnumbertwo.com, is that possible?

Kind of yeah, you can have your main one (mywebsite.com/page.html), and simply forward other domain's to 'mywebsite.com' when they arrive. You can set this in the other domain name's settings.

I'd recommend GoDaddy. I've got around 5 or 6 domain's and a premium hosting account with them and they've been great

[PKIDelirium]

GoDaddy here too, though only for domains. I used their hosting for a month and it sucked.

[MagSafe]

Originally Posted by PKIDelirium GoDaddy here too, though only for domains. I used their hosting for a month and it sucked.

How come? Mines never been down as far as I can remember The bandwidth isn't too bad either, although I do only use my package for small sites.

[PKIDelirium]

No cPanel and only one MySQL database, for starters. The mail was also painfully slow and didn't even work right on my ISP at the time.

[Escher]

I've been using pair for hosting since the mid-90's and have about a dozen domains (all the domains I own) with their PairNIC registrar. Not the cheapest price. But stable, reliable, and in business for well over 10 years.