Domain name Registration - Web Hosting Kenya

What is Domain or what is domain registration?

To correctly answer the question about what is Domain name or what it is to register a domain name i would prefer first to explain why you need a domain name.

When starting a business or company your business and or company must have a unique identity that will differentiate it from all other businesses whether they are offering the same services or goods as you. In that case your business must have a name registered under relevant authority.

On the internet your domain name is your unique identity and you or your company must have that identity to transact on the internet.

Registering a domain name does not prevent you from registering that business name or incorporating your company but, on a serious note you can begin transacting business with your newly registered domain as long as it is hosted on a web server without going through tribulations of registering that company especially the tribulations I see Kenyans going through while seeking registrations of their entities from the office of the attorney general.

Again, what is a domain name and how do I register my domain you ask?

A domain name is a unique name that is assigned to your IP address. An IP address is a number that is assigned to a computer each time it is connected to the internet. An IP Address looks similar to this number (192.03.45.67).

Now due to the difficulty of reading and remembering those IP addresses on the human part a simple technology was invented so that those IP addresses can be referenced using domain names. That is how domain name came into existence. Note however that computers have no difficulty remembering IP addresses.

 Each registered domain name has a unique IP address assigned to it.

Why can’t just host may website on my computer and use my computer’s IP address as my domain name, You ask?

Well, it’s possible to host your website on your laptop or PC for that sake but one important thing that also interests me is that if you don’t have a static IP address it will be nearly impossible.

Why?

Because IP addresses keep changing each time you connect and disconnect to the internet. Isn’t that amazing?

Back to our domain name and domain registration topic - A domain name has got some very 2 interesting parts namely the domain and TLD. A good example is omondi.com as a domain name. The omondi part is what is called the DOMAIN name while the .com part is known as TLD or top level domain in some other uses the TLD part i.e the .com can be referred to as an extension especially in the file naming field.

Now you ask, why do sometimes I see a www in the domain name?

Good question – the www stands for World Wide Web it can be said to be the platform. Adding www to our example omondi.com to make it www.omondi.com can be helpful since some website owners are not careful to consider configuring for a resolve to a naked domain name like omondi.com

A naked domain looks like this - omondi.com. If you were to visit a website and you forgot to add www.to-the-domain-you-are-looking-for.com the IP resolver might fail to locate the server hosting the domain name.

This subject is getting interesting and now I know the meaning of a domain name but what about the HTTP or HTTPS?

HTTP is the protocol used to connect and display web contents. The term HTTP simply means Hyper Text Transfer Protocol and the HTTPS is a secure extension of HTTP.

Example If you host your domain name on an HTTP server, the person hosting his/her website on a HTTPS server is hosting on a more secure server than you but all is about costs and objectives and more……. type of transaction you want to initiate on your website.

What is domain registration then?

Domain registration occurs when you register a domain name. Normally there are tools that allow you to search whois database and come out with a unique domain name that no other business or individual have. After a successful search, you should be presented with an option to register your new domain name – which normally involves clicking the register domain button.

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