How Do I Get My Own Domain for Email and a Website?

There can be many reasons to get your own domain for email and/or a website. Here are some common ones that might describe your situation:

• You keep having to change your email address every time you move and sign up with a new ISP.
• You are starting your own business and need the credibility that a business name domain brings.
• You would like to create a personal website that is reflected in the domain name.
• You've been using your college of business email address for personal use and you will be moving on soon.
• You send and receive large files and would like online storage for FTP-ing.
• You want to reserve domains for your children for their possible use in the future.
• You can't take the humilation of that old AOL address any longer!

Fortunately, Having your own domain is within reach of most anyone. It just takes a few bucks and an hour or so.

The first thing you need to know is that you will need to sign up for 2 services, not just one as you might expect.

The first service is to register your individual domain name, like myfirstmac.com. This should cost about $10 a year for as long as you need it. You can get discounts by prepaying several years in advance. In fact, it might be worth prepaying many years just to not have to go through the process of renewing every year. There are many domain registrars out there. One of the cheapest I've found is Go Daddy.

What registering the domain name does is give you right control that internet address. Unfortunately, most plain English one and two word domain names have been claimed already in the dot-com addresses. It's very frustrating to find an available one. You may need to move on to three or four word domain names. You also might have better luck getting your personal first and last name as a domain if it's not popular.

Once you have your domain registered, you will want to find a company to host your website and email service. That's the other half of the equation. Many web hosting companies will register your domain for you, sometimes throwing in a special package if you do both things with them.

Another reason to register your domain with your web hosting company is that it consolidates your billing. Believe me, many years down the road it's easy to forget who you pay for what service when you rarely interact with them. And you don't want to let either service lapse from forgetting to pay for them.

Quick Note: Most personal and small business use is easily handled by the cheapest tier of web service. As long as it provides email and web hosting, the volume of storage and transfer will be so low that the low cost options will be fine for you.

Doing these two steps is pretty straightforward if you've bought anything online before. The next step of tying them together is easy but a bit cryptic. This step is called pointing the DNS servers.

When you sign up with a web host, you will get one or two emails from them that are filled with the info you'll need to use all the services they offer. Somewhere in one of those are the web host's DNS server addresses. What you will need to do is go to your domain registrar, log in and click to wherever you designate the DNS servers. It's usually a form on the web page.

At this point, you click over to your web host email and copy the two DNS server addresses and paste them into the corresponding fields on the registrar's site. It's really easy, but just sounds confusing.

What this does is, it tells the every computer on the internet looking for yourdomain.com to go to your web host and look on their servers for your info and to route all your email through there.

So the good news is all that is pretty easy and affordable to set up. The next steps are a little more complicated. These steps are using the tools your web host provides to configure your email accounts and then probably create a website. These steps are outside the scope of this article due to the variety of tools involved in doing them.

But to get off to a good start, take a look through your web host's welcome email and look for the link, user name and password to access their control panel. This is an online service that most hosts use to let you configure your services with them. Take some time to explore the control panel.

The control panel is where you will establish email accounts, which is probably your next step. Once you set them up, you will need to configure your email program (like Mail or Entourage) to use your new, personalized email. Pretty cool! You are now off to find your fortune and fame with your own domain name.


Did this article get you moving to get your own address? Got additional questions or tips for setting up a domain? Let us know in the forum for this article by clicking below.

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Domain Registrars I've used and have been happy with:
Go Daddy
Aplus.net

Web Hosts I've used and been happy with:
BigBytes.net (Cheap)
Aplus.net (Good)
1&1 (Good)
Media Temple (Robust for heavy use)

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