Domain Name Registration

Domain names on the Internet are ‘owned’, just like property in the real world. Owning a domain name does not automatically mean that you’re going to publish a website, though mostly it does. There are a number of ‘Domain Name Registrars’ on the Internet and for under $20 a year, you can register any available domain name, usually for a minimum of 2 years. Domain Names are cheap! Ridiculously cheap! So much so, that most of the really really good ones are already registered. Registering a domain name infers some rights, including that to renew your registration and keep that domain name in perpetuity. Allowing that registration to lapse (not paying the Registrar) means that the registration ‘falls out’ of the DNS and your domain names don’t resolve anymore, effectively bringing your site offline until it’s resolved. (They don’t even care. It happened to hotmail.com once, believe it or not.)  Actually, it’s mostly automated, all the people involved really, really, really want you to get your site online so they can charge you their registration every year or two. It’s that whole host-parasite thing. Cheap domain names mean you can have lots of ‘hosts’ to suck out their domain name registration fees every year.  Expensive domains name would mean higher fees but markedly fewer hosts. After a period of deregistration, which differs from top-level domain to domain, but never longer than a couple of months, anyone can come along and register ‘yournextfacebook.com’ and load their own site and do their own thing instead.