When I was starting to think about creating a website one of my first thoughts was what web address it would have so that people could find it.

The idea was to create a website for me to use to learn how to create webpages and do things on the internet, while also providing a diary of what I was doing during the summer. The easiest way for anyone that knew me to find my webpage seemed to be to have a domain name called HamishBaisley.com

As I looked online there seemed to be advantages to buying your own domain name:

• Same Address Forever: If I wanted to move around different hosting providers in future I could take my domain name with me and people wouldn’t need to find a new address. (If I used free hosting I might end up with a domain like freehostingfornow.com/hamishbaisley but if they started charging or I decided for another reason to move to betterfreehosting.com, I’d lose that address and be starting again)
• My Choice of Email Address: It gives you an email address in the name you choose. So, if I own HamishBaisley.com I can have emails like Hamish@hamishbaisley.com or if I ran a competition on my website I could create competition@hamishbaisley.com
• Reserve It: Only one person can have a domain name at one time. I’ve got quite an unusual name but if there’s other Hamish Baisley’s out there they might want to reserve the name, so if I want it I have to get there first. The other thing is to protect against someone getting the name and using it in a way I’m not happy about. Say someone decided to create a site called hamishbaisley.com and dedicate it to hunting wild animals – I wouldn’t want my name associated with that, and I prevent it by buying my own domain.

So, I decided to have a hunt around. There are loads of different sites that will help you register a domain and the price can be quite different. 

My dad had registered a domain for his company and he said it was a good idea to buy a domain for a long time. He says that once you set it up you normally end up setting it to auto-renew. (That is, if it is about to run out, the site will automatically extend it so you don’t lose it and charge the card you paid with.) He said you can get lots of good offers for one/two/three years, but then when the auto-renew goes through it is much higher. He suggested just buying for 10 years so you can just forget about it and know it’s there for you and you’re not going to need to do anything for ages.

I’ve already bought hamishbaisley.com by the time I wrote this article so we went back and priced up buying my Dad’s name – gordonbaisley.com – and here’s the price for 10 years from a few different sites. You can see it is definitely worth shopping around, the highest price is twice the lowest for the same thing. 

Namecheap.com – £72.91

Names.co.uk – £143.99

GoDaddy UK – £146.25

Google Domains – £100 (£10/year auto-renew)

So there you have it! My Dad bought the domain for me at Namecheap.com and I own it for 10 years. In subsequent articles, I’ll explain how I set it up and am using it.