Buying a domain name?

[Kendodd]

I hope somebody sees this, not sure where to put it.

I want to buy a domain name for a business I am setting up, the name is available but to register it on a website builder costs £10.99 for one year. Can I register it myself somehow so that I have the name and it's mine forever? I think I might be getting a bit contused about what I'm paying for, I don't have a clue about how to build/host a website.

You need to realise that the domain name is not the same as a website. You buy the name, and in addition, pay a hosting company to give you space on their server. You can design the site yourself, or have yet another person do it for you and upload it to their server.

IMO you would be better buying the domain yourself through a registrar (ours is with network solutions). You are then in the position of being able to change host and take the name with you. So you don't need to change the name, only the place and that makes no difference to customers.

As for owing it forever, you own the domain name for as long as you have paid to have the name registered as yours with ICAAN, the company which controls all names worldwide. In practice this means you buy it through a registrar for 3 or 5 years (or whatever), they send you a renewal notice and you renew the name. Easy.

As SquirtedPerfume says you have to keep paying for it to keep it. While I pay for my domain names separately from the website and I do think it is better, it is also more setting up to do. If you are new to this you may be better off paying for the website and domain name as one package. The domain name should still be yours to take with you to a new company if you want to later on.

Either way you will have your domain name at £10.99 per year plus the cost of your website. I pay about £30 per year for that on top of the domain name, but it depends what you are getting for it.

When you pay for the website you are paying for space on their server for your files and for the bandwidth for sending the pages to visitors. These amounts may be unlimited or not depending on the package.

You should also get your own mail using your domain name. For example if your domain name is brackets.com you could have [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] and so on

I'd forgotten about this, bought mine for my will writing firm almost a year ago, must look into renewing it.

123 reg is a good one!!

Thanks for the advice.

If I go for a domain name and website package can the servers then increase the price for the domain name when I want to renew it?