TechAsh's Blog

When designing a website there are many things to think about, the layout, the content and the theme for example. But there are other equally important things to be considered. One of these is the domain name, the thing that visitors will have to enter into their address bar to access your site.

In this and following blog posts I will discuss the two main providers of free domains as well as briefly touch on what a domain is, the different ways that they can be set up and some of the things that should be considered when choosing a domain for your site.

So, to start with, what is a domain? Very simply it is the word or phase that a user types into their browser to access a site. For example "techash.tk" is a domain. Exactly how all this works is beyond the scope of this post, maybe some other time, or perhaps I'll write a tutorial on it.

Anyway, next, how do you choose a domain name? Well, firstly you should consider the type of website you are setting up, is it personal or for a company? If your website is for a company or business then you should probably look at getting a more universally recognised domain such as "company.com" or "company.co.uk". This is because these domains look more professional and are easier for people to remember, however you do have to pay for them. If you are designing a personal website then it doesn't really matter how professional it looks. It would be nice to have a ".com" address, but as an individual you may struggle to afford one.

This is where free domains come in. There are often full domain names, with restrictions placed on them, and it's very unlikely that you will find a company offering free ".com" domains, they generally use more obscure domain endings. The features provided by these free domains varies from company to company, but they will generally offer a variety of way to set them up, which I'll briefly run through now.

Web Forwarding (URL Forwarding)
This is the simplest way of setting up your free domain, but is only useful if you already have a domain or subdomain that can be used to access you site. Basically any visitors to your free domain will be redirected to the domain/subdomain you specify. This might be useful if your hosting provider has given you a long and hard to remember URL, the free URL can be used to effectively shorten it.

Zone Records
This is a more advanced, but more flexible method of setting up your domain. It involves setting the IP address of you server in the domains 'A' record. This means that you do not have to already have a URL, however it requires some settings to be made on the server hosting your website. Often the webhosting company will be able to help you in setting this up, but some technical knowledge is recommended.

Name Servers
Similar to the Zone Records above, but this lets you set another server that should effectively be given control of the domain name. This other server will then contains the Zone Records need to make the site work. Again your hosting provider will be able to help you get this set up. This is often the most flexible method of configuring your domain.

So that the basics of how domains work, I hope that this is useful and not too confusing. I will write two more blog posts on this subject soon, one on www.co.cc and one on www.dot.tk, two providers of free domains.