Make Sure You Own Your Name

The one thing that is a must, from the very beginning, is your own domain name. One that reads yourname.hostname.com is not yours. It belongs to the Web hosting service. If they change their policies or prices and you want to leave them, you lose your online identity. A domain name of your own costs less than $20 per year. Yes, the simplest and shortest ones (car.com, for example) are already taken, but with a little imagination you will easily find one that works for your business, possibly as easily as testing your own company name, perhaps combined with your location, at www.internic.net/whois.html, the largest domain name registrar's lookup page. Sooner or later, if you try enough names, you will come across one that fits your business.

Remember, though, that a domain name you think is catchy may not please your customers as much as it pleases you. What they want and need is something easy to remember that directly relates to your business, not something cute and frothy. It is always better to go with something like AlsArtGallery (assuming your name is Al and you run an art gallery) than CoolArtz, because CoolArtz does not help drum your business's name into the heads of potential customers, and this is (hopefully) the main reason you are making a promotional Web site in the first place. (Of course, if you come up with a domain name you really love, you can always change your business name to match it. You wouldn't be the first person to do this, either.)

Never Forget to Pay Your Domain Name Bill!

On December 25, 1999, Microsoft Network's Hotmail service starting giving users error messages like "unable to locate host" or "no such domain." Since Hotmail had tens of millions of users, this caused a certain amount of panic among Windows and Microsoft Network (MSN) users who relied on Hotmail for their online communications.

The problem turned out to be with Microsoft's "Passport" authentication service, which was (and still is) an integral part of Hotmail, MSN, and now, Microsoft's heavily promoted .NET services, which will, according to Microsoft, revolutionize the way we use both computers and the Internet. To use any of these services your identity must first be confirmed through Passport.

The 1999 Christmas "Passport failure" occurred because Microsoft had forgotten to pay the bill for Passport's domain name, so the big root servers at the heart of the Internet would not resolve (translate) browser requests for "Passport.com" into the numerical address (something like "207.68.179.63") computers know it by. Because of this, Passport was invisible to the world. And because Passport.com disappeared, many Microsoft services, not just Hotmail, stopped working.

Every business, big or small, must pay its domain name bills if it wants its site to show up. Microsoft doesn't get an exception, and neither do you.

The funny part of the Passport story is that the person who put Passport.com back on line did not work for Microsoft. Michael Chaney, a Linux consultant in Nashville, Tennessee, used his MasterCard to pay the outstanding bill to Network Solutions, Microsoft's domain registrar, through their online payment form. The bill was $35.

Microsoft later sent Chaney a check for $500, a rather small amount considering that Microsoft's failure to pay $35 was probably costing the company hundreds of thousands of dollars per hour even on Christmas Day, which is traditionally one of the lowest Internet traffic days.

What if This Had Happened to Your Business?

Imagine a customer or potential customer going to your site and finding it gone. He or she emails you, but since corporate email addresses are usually tied to the corporate domain name, the mail bounces back as undeliverable. As far as that customer is concerned, you have gone out of business unless your company is as big and well-known as Microsoft or a kind, Chaney-like customer comes to your rescue.

People talk about owning domain names, but in reality they are rented. No matter what else you do or don't do on the Internet, you must pay that domain name rent on time, every time