Your Public Internet Presence

Component Details

Domain Name Registration

At the top level of your Internet Presence is your domain name registration. Registration means you own the domain. To register a domain, you have to find one that isn't already registered, of course, and pay a domain name registrar to register your domain. Domain name registration is ultimately controlled by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), overseen by the U.S. federal government. All registrars operate under ICANN's rules, and their registration databases are tied to ICANN so that anyone can determine to whom a given domain name is registered.

Every registrar is a private business that can offer any other services and set their prices as they wish. Popular registrars include GoDaddy, Register.com, 1and1, Tucows, eNom, Network Solutions, and VeriSign.

Registration is a simple process. When you register your domain, the registrar adds your name and address to its database, and notifies ICANN that the information about your domain resides with them. Your registration record includes the name and IP address of the DNS servers (also called Name Servers) for your domain name (see next section).

You can register your domain for up to ten years. Some registrars a while back offered 100-year registrations, but these are not recorded in the official database; this only means the registrar promises to renew your domain every ten years. We haven't seen these available for a while, though. It was kind of a gimmick.

Your domain name registration is the most critical aspect of your network presence. If you let your registration expire, your website will be inaccessible, and no one will be able to send you e-mail, until you renew it, which you have sole prerogative to do during a thirty-day grace period.

If you fail to renew your expired domain name registration and someone else registers it after the grace period, you will have permanently lost the ability to use your domain name, unless you can convince the new registrant to transfer it back to you. If not, you would have to register a new domain name, and use new website and e-mail addresses.

When you rely on someone else, such as your web designer or a web hosting company, to register your domain for you, make sure that:

• It is registered under your name, and
• It is registered under an e-mail address that only you have control over.

Many web designers like to register all their clients' domains in bulk under the web designer's account with the registrar, to save money (which they may or may not pass along to you). Some unscrupulous ones do it so they can have leverage against you if you have a dispute later. If you don't pay your bill, they could change the DNS server listed in your registration to point to their own server with a blank page. If you had let them register the domain under their name, there would be nothing technically you could do about it.

DNS (Domain Name Services) Hosting

As you probably know, computers and servers find each other on the Internet using a numerical code assigned to each network or server called an IP address. DNS is the system by which your computer looks up the IP address for a web site name you type into your browser. And when someone wants to send you e-mail, the DNS system has special records (called MX records) that tell senders' mail systems where to deliver mail for you. Think of it like a phone directory, where your domain name is your name, and your IP address is your phone number, and the MX record is your street address.

When you have your own public Internet presence, such as a website or e-mail server, you need to have a DNS server available at all times on the Internet, to provide the IP addresses of your servers to people who are trying to access your website or send you e-mail. Even if you don't have your own e-mail server, and use something like Microsoft's Outlook.com (Office 365) or Google Apps mail, so long as you have your own domain name, you still need to manage your own DNS so that senders' mail systems know to send mail for your domain to the Outlook.com or Google mail servers.

Most of the time, your registrar will host your DNS, meaning they put all the information for accessing your servers on their DNS servers, and put a link to their DNS servers into your domain registration. But, if you have custom configuration requirements for your DNS servers, you might consider hosting your DNS with a company that focuses on DNS hosting only, and not anything else.

Examples of providers that specialize in DNS are:

• Neustar DNS (formerly UltraDNS)
• DNS Made Easy
• ZoneEdit.com
• XpertDNS

You might use these providers, instead of your registrar's DNS services, if your registrar doesn't support advanced DNS features such as:

• DNS security (DNSSEC)
• DNS-based load balancing for e-mail servers you have on separate Internet connections
• Dynamic DNS for a server on a network without a fixed IP address

DNS hosting is generally inexpensive. When picking a provider, you should consider their record of uptime, and the quality of their web-based DNS configuration control panel. Also, the ability to reach someone in technical support is very important. If somehow your DNS database gets corrupted or the DNS servers are not responding correctly, and you can't fix it in the control panel, you have to be able to reach someone who can help you. Some DNS providers are so cheap they don't have anyone manning the phones or even answering e-mails in a timely manner.

If you have a high-volume website, such that you lose money by the minute if it's inaccessible, you should consider using a DNS provider that has multiple servers geographically dispersed for better fault tolerance. But, bigger isn't necessarily better; criminals who employ targeted attacks on the Internet infrastructure are more likely to target the larger hosts so as to affect the most websites. And they especially like high-profile DNS hosting providers, since one DNS provider can be the gateway to thousands of websites. So, if you go with a large provider, you should know how capable they are of mitigating such attacks.

DNS hosting doesn't expire, necessarily, like a registration does. If your DNS provider bills your credit card monthly, you'll be fine so long as you keep that card active. But, many DNS providers bill annually and will e-mail you a bill, and cut you off if you miss it and don't pay. Like with an expired registration, this will disable access to your website and your inbound mail. But, you will not lose the rights to your domain name simply by failing to pay for your DNS hosting services.

Web or E-mail Hosting

This brings us to the final component of your internet presence, your web and mail servers. Your web server is where the actual content of your web site resides, and your mail server is where inbound mail is delivered to addresses at your domain name, and placed in your mailbox for you to retrieve from your computer, tablet, or phone.

Web Server

Mail Server

Please read on to the final page of this article, for the most important information.