Cheap domain name hosting

Say you’re starting a website, and you’ve done your research on domain names. You’ve done a trademark search and have found a domain name that you like, that did not show up in a trademark search, and that is available with the extension you want. First of all, congratulations. It’s not that easy to come up with a good domain name that has the extension you want. When it comes time to proceed with domain registration, you may ask yourself: “Should I register my domain name with as many extensions as possible to keep them from being hijacked?”

Some people will tell you the answer is yes. Registering a domain name is not that expensive, and it would keep everyone else’s dirty paws off all the versions of your name. But then again, what would stop someone from registering a common misspelling of your domain name and using it to siphon off your web traffic? Maybe you should register all the common misspellings of your domain as well. This is the kind of thing that can go on until you’re steeped in paranoia, not happy until you register every domain extension in every misspelling of your domain name, which can add up to a lot of money. And if you’re a small start-up, you may not have that much money to throw around.

A better idea is to trademark your domain name. That’s expensive too, no question. About the cheapest way is to do all the forms yourself then file them along with the filing fees. It will add up to around $300. But once you have a registered trademark, you have legal protection that comes with it, and you have legal grounds to stop someone who is trying to either capitalize on your site’s popularity or maliciously make a similarly-named malware site in an attempt to ruin your business. It’s sad, but true. People actually do this sometimes.

And sometimes business will go ahead and grab up the other top level domain extensions when they go through domain registration because they can use their web hosting providers to direct all those names to the main site. For example, if your main website name is yourawesomewebsite.com, you might want to register yourawesomewebsite.org too. Then have your web hosting provider point yourawesomewebsite.org to the main site, yourawesomewebsite.com. There are people who will register domain names with keywords in them and also have them point to the main site. And it is possible to get carried away with this process, too.

Perhaps the best strategy is a combination strategy.

Once you’ve found the domain name you want with the extension that you want, and it hasn’t been trademarked, and it’s available, while you’re going through the domain registration process, go ahead and register it with the top two extensions you want, say .com and .org. If you can afford it, register the most common misspelling of your domain name with the top two extensions. Register your domain name’s trademark. Have your web hosting provider point all the domain names to your main site’s domain.

You will have most of the bases covered by doing this. Anyone with malicious intent will have to go to some trouble to get a name similar to yours, and will probably have to use one of the less common domain extensions. And if someone is this determined to either ride your popularity or harm your site, you will have the protection of a registered trademark giving you legal standing to tell them to stop, or threaten to sue, which is usually enough to get them to back off.

More domain extensions are a good idea in some situations, and to a certain extent. If you can afford it, register your chosen domain name and the most common misspelling when you go through the domain registration process. Trademark your domain name. Then you can focus on the most important thing, which is making your new site a big success.