Subtitles of the Movie

This module details the start to finish process of getting a domain name and associating it with your website. All the other modules in this chapter give you information about what you need, why you need it, where to find it, how much will it cost and this module describes the entire process for you. I will offer some screen shots into the Network Solution’s registrar service with a domain name that I’ve registered there recently myself. I obviously can't do a new registration process now because I don't actually have a domain name that I wish to register but I can show you some of the steps anyway, let’s have a look. The steps for associating the domain name with a website are as follows. First, obviously you have to have the site created and uploaded to the web host, it’s possible to obtain a domain name without having a website but it’s not possible to link them together unless you obviously have a web site. We’ll treat this web site as working and loaded on the web host. Now please note, the rest of the steps in this process can be done by you or they can be done by your web host. A lot of the web hosts do all these steps for you to make it easy for you but if you want to know the process involved, you can do most of these steps yourself. There is very little that the web host actually has to do. Next, once you've got the web site functioning, you can check to see whether the domain name is available. At the time of registration, you must supply two things, you must supply the contact details for the individual or organization that the domain name is registered to, in other words the person that owns the domain name, the domain name is said to be owned and you must also supply technical contact details. These are the contact details of the person who is going to be administering the website. Now this can be you or this can be your web host. It really doesn't matter; you decide or rather the person who owns the domain name gets to decide this. If you’re building the web site on behalf of somebody else then you should be the technical contact and they should be the domain name main contact Next you get in contact with the organization that is going to host your website and tell them about the domain name that you wish them to host for you. The web host will then modify their own network settings, their local DNS to reflect that there is a new domain name within their system. This means that any incoming requests for particular domain names will be directed appropriately, they’ll be directed to your web site. Now no actual requests are going to come in yet because the actual, the Internet itself, the root domain name service have not yet been instructed to look on this particular web host for the domain name, that's the next step. So somebody, either you or the web host have to go back to the site where the domain name was registered and delegate the domain name to the web host. How does this happen, well you go there and you enter a primary and secondary DNS details and these are the DNS details of the web host. Let me show you what I’m talking about here, here we are in Network Solutions, so what happens is lets say you've just registered a domain name with Network Solutions, I have a domain name that I can test out here and you need now to have it registered to, sorry, hosted by a particular web host So I would come in here and I would click on make changes. Click there and then I enter the name of the domain that I wish to manage which in this case is foldingtablesaustralia.com which I created recently for a colleague of mine and we click on the Go button and off we go and we end up on this page. Now this is an interesting page, you are the account holder, whoever registered the domain name in the first place is the account holder, they will be assigned an account number by Network Solutions in this case and you will also be asked to choose a password so those can be then entered in there. Now it’s quite interesting because you don't actually have to give your Internet service provider your account number and password because once they have that, they can change anything they like and you may not trust them entirely. So what you also get when you create your account is an Internet service provider login just for that particular domain name. So you provide your account number, which is the same account number as this one, then the domain name which in this case will be foldingtablesaustraila.com and they have their own special ISP password. This password is separate to your password and when they log in with those details, the only things that they’re allowed to modify are the technical details, the technical domain name server details for that particular domain name. They can't modify any of the other account information, which is very useful but I will now login using my account number and password and I’m not going to show you myself doing that because I don't want you to see this account number and then I will log in and I’ll just do that now. Now that I’ve logged in, I can modify the DNS host information. Now if I was the web host service or the Internet service provider, this is exactly what I would do, I would go straight here and say well I’m now going to provide the DNS hosting information for foldingtablesaustralia.com, I'll go and do that, which takes me to this page, I can change the DNS hosting information, which I’m just about to have a look at, I can also change the technical contact, which would be me because I’m building the website or the domain administrator which is my colleague who I’m building the website for. So let’s go and have a look at the DNS information now, and here are the details of the primary and secondary DNSs for, in this case Pacific Internet Australia who are the host of this particular website. The primary DNS is this machine name here which has an IP address which is here, the secondary DNS machine is here and it has a domain name, sorry that's it’s machine name and that's it’s IP address. Now I can change those if I need to, there’s a modify button, I’ll go and click on that, let’s have a look at how we change it and that takes us to this page where we enter primary and secondary DNS information. So they would be typically something like dns1.myisp.com and dns2 perhaps myisp.com and then you’d click on the continue button which I’m definitely not going to do because that would then cause foldingtablesaustralia.com to be no longer accessible because those are dummy details. So that's the process, let’s go back to our step-by-step guide now, so the DNS details have been entered into the registrar’s site. What happens then is automatic, within a couple of days, those details are propagated around to the many DNS servers around the Internet so that anybody who tries to access foldingtablesaustralia.com in this particular example will be forwarded to Pacific's Internet’s system and in there their request will be directed to the appropriate machine and the appropriate directory and that's the process, it doesn't take all that long to do and most of the time you won’t have to do any of that except choose the domain name you want, you get in touch with the web host, tell them the domain name you want and they say, yes leave it with us, it will be ready in a couple of days. maybe it will take a week, maybe it will take 2 weeks depending on what kind of backlog they've got but that's what they will have to do you can speed it up for them by doing some of that process yourself if you want to. Some web hosts charge for this particular service and some bundle it for free within their web host costing infrastructure. Some of them charge a setup fee and some of them don't. Once you've got your domain name fully published and your website published, the next thing to do is to let the world know that your website is there so they can come