TLD Registration

All hosting packages require a domain name. It is like www.your-desire-name.com

Why you need a Domain/Website Name Registered?

Not having your own domain name will create the following perception in the minds of most people:

• Probably new
• Definitely small
• Maybe part time
• Probably not a real company

  

A strong possibility of being a "shady operator" Having your own domain does not lead people to automatically trust you. However, with this small step you will successfully alter their perception of you to:

• Probably established
• Could be large or small
• Full time
• Probably a real company
• Being a "shady operator" not impossible

And some reasons to have web presence

1. To open a cheapest 24-hour, 365-days-a-year sales channel.
2. To establish a presence,
3. To network: The Internet lets potential clients find you.
4. To make business information available: Think of the Yellow Pages ad. What are your hours? What do you do (or not do)? How can someone contact you? Where are you located? What is today's special? You can keep your customers informed of every (changing) reason to do business with you on the Internet.
5. To serve your customers: Making business information available is one of the most important ways to serve your customers. Allow your customers to find what is in stock at your store. What colours are available? All this can be done quickly and simply on the Internet
6. To heighten public interest.
7. To release time-sensitive materials: What if your materials need to be released no earlier than midnight next Friday? With the Internet, the release is up to you. Imagine the "hype" and anticipation one gets from the announcement. "All materials will be made available on our Internet site at 12:01AM Friday."
8. To sell things.
9. To make pictures, sounds and film files available.
10. To reach a highly desirable demographic market.
11. To answer Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ).
12. To stay in contact with salespeople.
13. To open international markets.
14. To make changing information available quickly.
15. To allow feedback from customers.
16. To test market new services and products: It is very expensive to roll out a new product. Once you have been on the Internet for a while, you will know what works and what doesn't. You will also realize how inexpensive it is to change your presence to fit your customer's needs. For the cost of a page on the Internet you can have a crystal ball into where to position your product or service in the marketplace. Amazing. Isn't?
17. To reach the media: Media people are the most "wired" profession today since they can get information more quickly, cheaply and easily on-line. On-line press kits are becoming more common. Digital text can be edited on tight deadlines. All of your company items of interest can be made available to the media on your Internet page.
18. To reach the education and youth market: If you have anything that you can sell to young people be aware that soon most schools and libraries will be connected to the Internet. Anything you have that youth would be interested in needs to be on the Internet.
19. To reach the specialized market.
20. To serve your local market.

Can you see the potential in the differences?
Another important point of course is branding. You want your name to become known and familiar. Something that people can remember easily. Something they will associate with what you do. That's a tall order if you don't have your own name to begin with. With your own domain name, plus the right words and correct image, your task of creating trust is that much easier.
With the cost of new domain names now cheaper than ever, you really have no excuse for not obtaining your own. The small fee that you pay per year for your own domain name is peanuts compared to the benefits that you get.

Our company is a big & reputable one. Everyone knows it, I don't need a website.
If your company is big and/or reputable, then people expect you to have a website before any other company else. If not, people think "what is wrong with this company? They don't even have a website?". Do you know any big and/or reputable company with no telephone? I'm sure you don't. These days, website became as important as a telephone. Just because every one knows about Toyota, Toyota did not stop there. They've their own website http://Toyota.com/.

I published my website on a free hosting service. Why should I've my own website name?
If you put up your website with one of the free web hosting services, the only company who benefits is the web hosting company, NOT you. The last person who benefits is you. There are many reasons why having your own website name is a must:

1. When you have your own website name, the address of your website will be of the form http://YourCompany.com. On the other hand, if you put up your website on one of the free servers, the address of your website will be something like: http://SomeFreeWebsite.com/YourWebSite/. Which of these two sounds more professional? Which of these two is smaller and is hence easier to remember? Note that, every person who access web knows that it is a free hosting company and you published your reputable company information on the FREE hosting servers and you don't have your own. Compare this with “Having your own telephone number for your company versus giving a PP telephone of your neighbor shop.” PP number clearly tells that you don't have your own telephone number and a small company.
2. Just imagine having to change host for your website. All the work of promoting of your URL goes into the trash! Sure you might be able to set up a redirect for a month or so, but ultimately you'd have to do all your previous promotion all over again from scratch.
3. Imagine, the FREE hosting service closed their service similar to Hyderabad.com! Immediately every single link to your website from anywhere in the universe is broken! All search engine and directory listings would be useless to you! You will loose all of your visitors. Frightening, isn't it? As a website name is simply a pointer to an address, having your own website name means you can change hosts at any time. Your website name remains the same, only the address of the server it points to changes. Compare this moving to a new home and keeping the same telephone number. No loss of visitors, no wasted promotion!
4. I'm not established now, I'll register my website name for my company later. Don't put it off until you're more established. If you wait for to become reasonably popular before deciding to register your name, you will probably find you're too late. Someone else will have already taken the name! Then what will you do? There is a rumour that one of our most popular Telugu newspaper paid about one crore rupees to get their website name, because someone else registered that name long before. Remember that there are more than 3.5 crore websites registered and thousands of websites are registered every single day.
5. Build credibility: The only way to make money online is to build up credibility among your customers. Having your own website name is the first step in doing that. Your customers will feel more comfortable buying whatever it is that you are selling if you have your own website name. It makes your customers feel that they are dealing with a large, established company, rather than with some fly-by-night operator.
6. When you have your own website name, you can have multiple emails of the form This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it . This allows you to assign different emails to different functions. For example, for questions on products & services that you sell, you can direct your visitors to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it . For comments/ suggestions about your website, you can direct them to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it . Having different email addresses for different functions not only makes it easier for you to filter your email using your email client program such as Outlook Express etc., but also gives your customers the impression that yours is a large, established company with whom it is safe to do business.
7. Many search engines give a lot of emphasis to the home page of a particular website, i.e. other things remaining the same, a home page of a website will often rank higher for a particular keyword than any other page. When you use some of the free hosting services, your index.html page is the home page of your website, but not of that your free hosting website. Hence in these search engines, your website will find it very difficult to make it to the top 20 or top 30, let alone the top 10 for some of the really competitive keywords. Just think of the amount of traffic that you will lose if this happens. In case you don't know what a search engine is, it is something like a 197 directory information or enquiry counter, where you ask for information. Search engines index websites and keep all that information handy. When you want to find out which website has the information you're looking for, you go to search engine such as Google.com and it tells you all the websites that have the information you're looking for.
8. Some search engines are now refusing to spider the websites which are hosted by the free web hosts. For instance, if you have a website hosted by the free web hosts, you would, until recently, have got the infamous error message saying that too many pages have been submitted from your website if you tried to submit your website to search engine AltaVista. While Altavista now says that "your URL has been submitted for processing" if you try to submit your website, rest assured that it will not spider any website belonging to many of the free web hosts even though it says that your website has been accepted. Can you afford that?
9. When your website is hosted by some of the free web hosts, you will find it very difficult to get it listed in a major directory like Yahoo.com. Although Yahoo.com will never admit that it won't add a commercial site which is hosted by one of the free web hosts, in practice, it will be a miracle if you can get your website listed by Yahoo.com. Listing your website with Yahoo.com is difficult enough even when you have your own website. Don't make your task more difficult than what it needs to be.

Website/Domain Registration Tips

1. The extension - Will it be a .com, .net, .org, .info etc. Any of these will get crawled and indexed by the search engines, but if you can get a .com for your chosen name you'd be better off, as this extension is more common and carries an air of legitimacy with it.
2. Probably the most important aspect of your domain name registration is the choice of keywords to use in your domain name. Try to use the main keyword or phrase you'd like to optimize the whole site for, and see if you can craft a domain name around it. The search engines favor keyword-rich domain names.
3. Keep it short if possible. A shorter name is easier to remember than a long one.
4. Try to keep your domain name registration topically relevant. As search engines get smarter and smarter, sites that display total relevance will rank higher than catch-all sites.
5. Avoid other companies' trademarks and copyrights in your domain name.
6. Register Multiple Extensions: It would do you good to register various domain name extensions (called top level domains). People often type in different extensions because they want to be sure to explore all websites that have the same name. So, if you own YourBusinessName.com, you should also buy YourBusinessName.net and YourBusinessName.org, then point one site to the other. This guarantees that you don't lose traffic due to mistaken extension and also some of your competitors won’t register that name and trouble you.
7. Register Multiple Variations: It is advisable to register different variations of your domain name so that you are assured of catching visitors who type-in words that are very similar.
8. Register Misspellings: If your company's name can be misspelled, chances are that it will be. Be proactive and register the misspelled name so that you are assured of catching the traffic. We many instances of where users type yahooo.com or yaho.com for yahoo.com
9. Register both the full name and its acronym or abbreviation: If your chosen name is quite long, register both its full version, as well as its acronym. Many big companies failed to do this and have seen the consequences of this oversight. An example is General Motors which registered gm.com and generalmotors.com.

You MUST know before registering a domain

Transfer-out fees
Buried in the fine print of a registrars' "Terms of Service" will be a hidden fee authorizing them to charge your credit card a "transfer-out" fee if you move your domain to another registrar. Often times, this transfer-out fee is 2 or 3 times the cost of the original registration. This practice violates the ICANN policy on domain transfers. In most cases if this happens to you a simple call to your credit card company will have the charge reversed, if you notice. Registrars who use this practice play the numbers game as many will not.

WHOIS Edit Fees and Locks
Every time you register a domain name, the details of that domain registration must be published in a publicly accessible database called WHOIS.
One of the functions a registrar is supposed to be providing to you is the ability to change those WHOIS records. Some registrars (especially the bargain basement outfits) register your domain for a dirt-cheap price and then ding you with an "administration fee" when you want to edit your WHOIS record. Some others may also "lockdown" your domain for 60 days every time you make an edit to your record, preventing you from moving the name out to another registrar.
You will get the control panel and you are free to change WHOIS information as many times as you wish. We provide a locking mechanism for you in the control panel and we strongly suggest you to lock your domain as soon as you make changes. When you want to change WHOIS info, unlock the domain, do the changes as desired and lock it immediately to prevent any unauthorized transfers. Register your domain now.

Premium WHOIS Privacy Services
Because your domain record is public for all to see, some registrars want to upsell you to "privacy services" or "WHOIS masking", "private registration", where they put their own info in the WHOIS record instead of yours.
The important thing to know here is that in the eyes of the domain Registry to which all the Registrars interact, and the Registry's oversight body (like ICANN, or in Canada, CIRA), whoever is listed in the domain WHOIS record as the domain Registrant is the legal owner of the domain name. Keep that in mind, if you use a service like this, they own the domain, not you, not withstanding whatever contract or Terms of Service you enter into with them to "own" this name on your behalf. If it lands in a dispute proceeding it will be an open and shut case: they own the name.
Taking it one step further, some "privacy" services will get you to sign up for the WHOIS privacy service and then they turn around and happily offer to sell your true data to anybody else who cares to pay for it.

Registrar-lock
There has historically been a real problem with "domain slamming" (see above) and unauthorized domain transfers, so the "registrar-lock" was created to protect a domain against this. If the registrar lock is set, nobody can transfer your domain away from you. This is actually a good thing and best practices include having this set for all your domains. The sharper registrars enable it by default when they register or transfer a domain for you. Alas, this lock can become a real problem for you if it is turned on and the registrar will not turn it off, or give you the ability to turn it on or off yourself.
Our control panel allows you to lock and unlock your domain and we strongly suggest to lock your domain as soon as you do any changes. We, ourself do not lock your domain.

Domain Auth-code
Some of the Top-Level-Domains (TLDs) run on a protocol called "EPP" and to further guard against unauthorized transfers, a domain must have an 8-character auth-code supplied before it will transfer. Current examples are .BIZ, .INFO and .ORG. The current or "losing" registrar holds this code. You need it if you want to move your domain away. Hopefully they will give it to you.
Your control panel lists the AUTH-CODE and is available for you all the time without even contacting us.