The Wellspring

So, news has been a little slow over the past few days. Time for a tutorial!

One of the questions I am most frequently asked is how I set up my domain (www.alanwu.org). It’s not as difficult as you may think – with a little patience and a willingness to do some reading, anyone can do it. Nor is it as expensive – a yearly presence with a .com or .org domain name will set you back about AUD$15 – $20, depending on how big and how popular your website is.

This three-part tutorial will take you through the process of registering a domain name, setting up a website and getting email at your domain working. The whole process takes two or three hours, which consists mostly of filling in online registration forms and waiting to receive information. A basic understanding of the global interweb is useful, but not really necessary – though there’s a lot of jargon, but for the most part you don’t actually need to understand how it all works (only that it does, indeed, work). The most technically difficult aspect of the whole process is developing the website, but even if you don’t have expertise in that area, you can still get a perfectly functional presence online by adopting ready-made designs. This tutorial will use specific services (the ones that I currently use myself), but if you choose not to use these, the information should still be applicable.

To complete the process, you’ll need internet access, an existing email account, and a credit card (payments are processed electronically, so this is a must).

First: let’s run through what we’ll do: to get everything working, you’ll need to sign up for four different services. These components work together to link a domain name (like yourname.com) to a website (so that people will be able to see something when they visit yourname.com), with a working email service (so you can send and receive information via yourname@yourname.com).

The first service is domain registration: the process of reserving a domain name with a central authority (called a registry) so that no one but you can use it. Domain names are of the form example.com (and NOT www.example.com). Domain registrars act as intermediaries between you and the registry, and they charge a fixed annual fee for this service.

Top-level domains, such as yourname.com, yourname.net, and yourname.org, are administered by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), and sold through ICANN-accredited registrars. Prices vary widely, so it really pays to look around. You should be paying between USD$5 – $15 for a domain name for a year.

Australian country-level domains, such as yourname.com.au, yourname.net.au, yourname.org.au and yourname.id.au, are administered by the .au Domain Administration (auDA), and similarly sold through auDA-accredited registrars. The rules for registering an Australian-level domain name are much stricter than those at the top-level (for example, you must be a bona fide not-for-profit organisations to register yourname.org.au, whilst anyone can register yourname.org). Because of the tighter differentiation between domains, they are also priced differently: .com.au and .net.au retail for around AUD$50 for two years, whilst .org.au and .id.au retail for around AUD$15 – $30 for two years.

The second service is the Domain Name Service (DNS), which tells the world what you want to do with your domain name. Most commonly, it is used to create a hostname. Most hostnames have another word attached to the domain name like www.yourname.com. Each hostname corresponds to a website. DNS links this hostname to your website, so when people want to visit www.yourname.com, their web browser can find it. This is a little like calling directory assistance to have them find a phone number based on someone’s name.

The third service is web hosting, which refers to the storage and retrieval of your actual web pages. After a web browser has checked with the registrar to see that your domain name is valid, and checked with DNS to find out where to look for your website, it goes to your web host to retrieve your web pages. This is the simplest of the three, and the only one that can work by itself. If you don’t have a domain name registered or DNS service, you can always still refer to your site, though it will have a much less glamorous address (usually something like yourname.yourisp.com).

The fourth service is email hosting, which provides you with the capability to send and receive email using an address @yourname.com. You don’t require this service, but email remains the most important and most-used service on the internet, and having an address @yourname.com is easy for your friends to remember. It used to be quite expensive, but new operators like Microsoft and Google have recently entered the sector offering free services.

Often, these services are bundled together. Buying them like this makes it much easier for you, but also makes it much more expensive, especially if you select an Australian provider (where there seems to be less competition). When comparing prices, it’s important to understand which specific services are included in the price (for example, registration is often sold by itself, but means very little unless you sign up with DNS and web hosting).

Next up: selecting service providers, on the cheap!