How vital is to discover the best domain name?

One of the most important prerequisites for having a successful online presence is the domain name. It is what visitors will spot first when they stumble upon your web site and what they will associate you with. The domain should be easy to remember, but should also be something that notifies your website's visitors what the website is about.

Generic Top-Level Domains (gTLDs)

A domain typically contains two components - a Top-Level Domain (TLD) and a Second-Level Domain (SLD). If you have domain.com, for example, ".com" is the Top-Level Domain Name and "domain" is the Second-Level Domain. There are a few categories of Top-Level Domains that you should contemplate prior to picking the domain name you desire. Your pick should be built upon the goal of your web site and on its target viewers. Let's take a look at the gTLDs, or generic TLDs - these are the most widespread TLDs intended to show a given purpose - .com (commercial organizations), .net (network infrastructures), .biz (companies), .info (informative resources), .org (organizations), .mobi (handheld devices), .asia (the Asia-Pacific region), .name (individuals or relatives), .pro (specific walks of life), etc. As you can see, these TLDs cover most spheres of life, so you should pick the one that would indicate the objective of your web page best. There is no restriction as to who can register such domain names, but some of them involve extra procedures to show that you qualify to possess such a domain name (.mobi and .pro, for example).

Country-code Top-Level Domain Names (ccTLDs)

The ccTLDs, or country-code TLDs, are country-specific domain names. Each country has its own ccTLD. Registering such a Top-Level Domain is good if your target group of web page visitors is from a certain country. Many guys would want to buy goods or services from a local web site, and if your target is Canada, for instance, picking a .ca domain name could increase the visits to your web page.

Domain Name Forwarding

You can register a bunch of domain names, which can forward your visitors to a particular site like domain.com, for example. This would increase the traffic and reduce the risk of somebody swiping your website visitors by registering the same Second-Level Domain Name with another Top-Level Domain Name - if you are not using a trademark.

Name Servers (NSs)

Every TLD has domain records. The name server records (NS records, also known as DNS records) demonstrate where the domain is hosted, in other words they point to the hosting distributor whose name servers (NSs, also known as DNSs) it is using at the moment. You can modify the NSs of your domain name whenever you wish. You can have your domain registered with one provider and get the site hosting service itself from another. Hence, if you register your domain and come across decent website hosting services somewhere else at a later time, you can point your domain name to the current provider's DNSs at once.

Name Server Records (NS Records)

On the whole, as long as your domain name utilizes a given pair of NSs, all its NS records will direct to the same web site hosting provider. Some site hosting suppliers, however, enable you to modify given name server records, among them the A records and the MX records of your domain name. The A record is an Internet Protocol address, which details on which hosting server your site is hosted, while the MX records specify which web server tackles the e-mail addresses associated with your domain name. For example, if you engage a new web designer and he constructs an .ASP web page that will be hosted on his personal Windows hosting server, you may want to change just the Internet Protocol address (the A record) but not the MX records of your domain. In this way, www.domain.com will direct to the Windows hosting server, but your e-mail boxes or any sub-domains like forum.domain.com or shop.domain.com will still be in your current Linux webspace hosting account. The .ASP platform is created by Microsoft and requires a Windows web server, even though a Linux hosting server would be far more reliable.

Budget Top-Level Domains Distributed by 'Heartland Web Hosting'

Just a few web hosting vendors permit you to modify particular domain name records and quite often this an extra paid service. With Heartland Web Hosting , you get a huge assortment of TLDs to select from and you can edit all domain name records or redirect the domain names using a forwarding tool at no added cost. That is why, 'Heartland Web Hosting' would be your finest pick when it comes to administering your domain name and to establishing a successful presence on the Internet.