website name question....

[madcows]

Hi there,
I'm involved in a small charity. We have a website, that uses our name (beginning with the word 'the'). Does anyone know how easy it would be to 'own' and get the name without the 'the'. In other words, we have www.thesmallcharity.etc
and I want
www.smallcharity.etc.

Any idea how to do this, and what it would cost?

And then would I be able to redirect anyone who went to
www.smallcharity.etc.
to
www.thesmallcharity.etc.

I should know this, as was involved in setting up the website, but mind is foggy!
thanks,
madcows

If you go to www.namesco.com or google Nominet as they are the main registry provider in the UK.

You can type in the domain name and see if it has already been purchased. If it has, I'd forget it altogether as re-purchasing that name can run in to thousands.

However, if the domain is free and not purchased, it can cost from between 3-20 pounds to register it and you normally 'own' that domain for either 1 or 2 years before you need to pay for re-registration.

The cost is insignificant - even for a charity: you can get smallcharity.org.uk, smallcharity.org, smallcharity.co.uk and smallcharity.com for less than £30.

I use uk2.net for UK domain registrations, I would also recommend 123-reg, or GoDaddy (but they are a bit pricey for UK domains).

I recommend that you use one of those 3 sites to check if the domains are available (in the past some unscrupulous sites have registered domains that people have checked for so they can sell them at a high price).

You can point all your domains at the same web host: your current hosting package may or may not include the ability to handle this (look for 'parked domains' in the terms). It then takes a bit of code on your web server to redirect visitors to the right site.

Most web servers use Apache, and I'll post the code here for Apache with mod_rewrite if anyone is interested.

THank you - i've bought the site for £8.50... and decided to pay someone to do some work on our site (inclduing directing people from there to our proper site)!
Thanks for the help!

OK, so how does this work exactly? I searched for our business name ( the website name we would like to use )in a couple of these sites and it comes up as availiable to purchase.
However, having already googled the name I know that soemone else is already using it. Does this just mean that they are using it without registering the domaine name? and if so, can I just go ahead and register it as our doamine name - bearing in mind that the other users are either at the other end of the country or in the US?

Apologies if stupid question - total novice as far as this goes

If you're after a .uk address then enter the full address you want in the "whois" box here and it should let you know if it really is available:
www.nominet.org.uk/

It's quite possible that other people once owned a URL but then gave it up but links to it still remain out there on the internet.

So a Google search will throw up results for the URL despite it being dead.

thank you