For anyone thinking of setting up their own blog on an external hosting solution, this will be one of the first steps you will need to take.  I’m going to run through, step by step, the process I used to do this so you can do this for yourself.

Firstly, please refer to the previous article on this series as a background to this subject if you have n’t already  read this, you can access this here: ‘How to start your own Blog on an external host‘

Now, that you’ve decided your Domain Name for your blog, let’s get it registered.  As explained, you can use a range of providers for this Domain Name Registration service, and the easiest thing to do is to Google for this and check out a few sites to see what is the most cost-effective option for your particular case.  Join me as I go through the steps with the company I used to set up my Domain Names.

I used a company called 123-Reg, because it was very simple and easy to use, and they also offered me a competitive price for the domain name I was registering.  [Postscript:  I have now joined their affiliate programme because I found the site worked best for me, and allowed me to get my Domain Names registered in seconds].  So, first things first, go to the website:

http://www.123-reg.co.uk/

This is the opening screen, where you can enter your chosen Domain Name in the box where it says ‘Domain Search’, just enter your chosen name next to the ‘WWW.’ and CLICK on SEARCH:

If you prefer, you can enter the domain name you’d like to search for here and see if it is available (note a new screen will open where you can view the results of your search):

The next screen shot shows you the choices I was presented for the domain name, mykitchengarden, which was the blog we started in the article on blogger.com, a general blog provider (see this article here for more information http://technicalarticles.co.uk/?p=64.

As you can see, the domain name for the

.com
.co.uk
and .net

domains are already taken, but there is a good alternative for us, the name mykitchengarden.org is still available and would cost me £17.98 to register this for 2 years.  But, as we’re only playing around, look at the value for money option of only 0.99p for the name mykitchengarden.info, now that’s a bargain basement price, and we’ll go for that just to demonstrate the process.  So, select this name, and make sure you unselect anything else that has been selected, then CLICK on ‘Add to Basket’, check it’s added correctly and the amount is right, then CLICK on ‘OK, Lets Continue’.

NOTE: If you don’t like any of the suggestions, and you are determined to get a dot COM address, just click the ‘back’ button on your browser and repeat the process until you find something suitable.  For example, we could try the domain name mykitchengardenblog.com and see if that is already taken and so on.

On the next couple of screens, you are given options to add ‘WHOIS’ privacy, which hides your registration details for certain domains, together with ‘extras’ for adding email & web hosting etc.,  We only want a domain name, so just press continue on these screens.  Next check the amount is correct, and go on to the screen for creating your account.

We need an account to be created, so that we can log back in later and configure our Domain Name that we have registered to the Domain Names Servers used by our web hosting service to tell the Internet that your chosen name is linked to the IP address associated with the web-server that is hosting your blog.  So go ahead, select a User Name and password of your choice and go through the remaining details of making your payment and completing the registration process.  IMPORTANT: You will need to remember your account details, so make a note of your User Name & Password somewhere safe.   Once you have recieved confirmation, 123-Reg will send you an email confirmation, with your invoice details.  On receipt of this, you will be able to proceed to the next stage of the process, by logging into your account.

LINKING YOUR DOMAIN NAME TO YOUR WEB HOST

This is quite a simple step, but a very important one, because by doing this linking of your Domain Name to your web host’s Domain Name Servers, anyone on the internet will be able to use my selected URL, in this case, http://www.mykitchengarden.info/ and get to my blog.  Now, this does n’t happen instantly, because it takes time to propagate your chosen domain name to all the DNS server’s on the internet, and you may recieve a notice on completing this step that it will take up to 48 hours for this to happen.  In practice, it usually takes about 3-4 hours, and it’s usually available to try out.

So, in this next step, firstly go back to 123-Reg, and log-in with your user name & password.  To do this go to the homepage, and CLICK on ‘Login to your Control Panel’ button.  In the next screen, scroll down until you see the ‘Manage Domains’ Option, and CLICK on ‘Modify Domain’.

On the next screen, CLICK on the ‘Change Name Servers’ option, you can see my screen below for this technicalarticles.co.uk website.  Now by default, until you assign your own Domain Name Server details here, any user on the internet accessing your URL will be sent to the 123-Reg holding page.

You can also see the format of these entries, my DNS server names are as follows:

ns11.redbackinternet.co.uk

ns12.redbackinternet.co.uk

Ok, you’re going to now ask me where do I get these DNS server names.  Well, that’s a reasonable question.  You get these details, when you register with your web hosting provider, this is one of the things you will be provided when you set your external web hosting solution, and we will again cover this in the next article.  The details are usually provided in the ‘Welcome Email’ and in my case it contained all my account information together with my ftp log-in information and the following:

NAMESERVERS TO BE USED:
=======================
ns11.redbackinternet.co.uk : 217.112.82.20
ns12.redbackinternet.co.uk : 92.48.66.2

and these were the details, I entered into the area on 123-Reg for changing the Domain Name Servers.

That’s it really, it looks far more complicated than it really is.

Hope you found it useful and that this information will help you register your own Domain Name as the first step in getting your own blog off the ground.  All comments welcome, especially if you’ve found things different or encountered other problems.

Daniel Hunt

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