Registrars
For AU domains I sometimes use netregistry.com.au, and I still on occasion use MelbourneIT. The latter company bought the former in 2014, narrowing the amount of choice for the consumer considerably. Shortly afterwards, the price of AU domains rose to levels much higher than those of most other top level domains.
There are still some smaller players offering reasonable service and prices, among them uber.com.au and webcentral.com.au
Many use GoDaddy and Crazy Domains. I tend to avoid the latter.
Q
Do you think it is worth while to also secure .net and .org with each .com and .com.au domain?
A
Unless there’s a very good reason for doing so, I cannot recommend registering numerous related domains.
Q
What’s the difference between URL and Domain.
A
URL means Universal Resource Locator – this is a URL: http://www.dropbears.com/help. Domain is the dropbears.com part of that address.
Q
Who is my current registrar?
A
You can discover this by doing a whois query on your domain name.
Transfering AU Domains
You will need the Authcode (aka Registry Key, Domain Password, or UDAI Key) which may obtained via the control panel of the domain management system of the current registrar. If you do not have access to that panel, you’ll need to contact the registrar or the person who does have access and have them forward either the password for the panel or the key itself.
Go to registrar panel that you want to transfer your domain to, go to ‘Transfer your domain’
Enter your domain name and Authcode (domain key), then proceed from there. Some registrars require a renewal fee during transfer which is added to the current registration period, others do not. If the registration is due within 30 days, you wil need to renew it as part of the transfer process.
You should receive a confirmation email regarding the transfer from your old registrar. Confirm you want to transfer the domain and follow any other instructions in the email. Your domain needs to be active to successfully transfer.
Domain transfers may take as long as a 7 working days to complete.
Transferring other TLD’s (.com, .net, etc) is a similar procedure.
Domain Renewals
Our renewal fees are usually lower than most, and often less than half the price.
Fees vary between registrars. A quick check (Aug 2014) gave the following for .com.au
- Registrar 1: $127 per two years
- Registrar 2: $147 per two years.
Many registrars do not reveal renewal costs, only the cost of initial registration which is sometimes far below the competition. It is only when you go to renew the registration that you find that the fees are staggering.
Domain Names
The domain name is like a street address for websites. Just as as your house or business has an individual street address, the domain name is your address in on the internet..
There are several advantages to having your own domain –
You own your domain name as long as you pay the annual renewal fee. You can move the domain from one server to another as circumstances may require, and the site address remains the same.
Most search engines give much greater weight to a site which has its own domain. So if for instance Yahoo was ignoring your site despite requests for listing, if you had your own domain that situation would likely change.
Since December 1999 the previous limit of 26 characters was removed from dot com domain names. It is recommended that long domain names be restricted to 63 characters (including .com), although the limit is 67. My own preference is to keep the name as short as possible.
Many new top level domains (TLD’s) have been introduced, so it is possible to get quite a catchy name with one of the new suffixes. Examples include .to, .tv, .name , .biz and .info.
I recommend using a country domain or a dot com – on Iphones, there is a present button for .com.
Australian dot com au domains were once restricted to one per registered business or company name.
You may use only alphanumeric characters and the dash (-) in a domain name. You cannot use the underscore, ampersand, asterisk etc.
Much more on this subject at Wikipedia
More Information:
See Domain, Business, and Company Names at IP Australia
IMPORTANT: Ensure the email address you use for domain registrations is a permanent one. If you change your email address and fail to update it at your registrar, you will have problems. Please read the section on this under Email Topics