Infotainment Zone

If you are anything like me, you'd probably like to have a website on the Internet but you just have no idea how to go about it. All this talk of web hosting, bandwidth, disc space, and other jargon can cause one to say, "This is too complicated and technical, I just wanted to have a place to put all of my favorite skateboarding photos, cool information on ramp designs, and the best places to skate!" To get a website on the Web you have to go through a web host. The question is how do you find the web host for you? If you type 'web host' into your search engine like Google you will get thousands of sites. Hit on one of these and like any product on the market you will see all sorts of persuasive propaganda to incite you to use their company; that is if you can decipher any of the technical jargon that only computer-heads can comprehend. Some web hosts offer free business cards with an account; some probably offer free watches?like all consumer industries you the buyer must beware. I'm a writer so I'll use the analogy of a writer's journal. The journal I like must not be too big or small in book size. It also must have a good amount of space allocated to each day, again not a whole page but not just a few lines. Of course I also want it to be cheap but of a good quality that won't fall apart while I'm using it, and I hope it would last for posterity. I just want the diary, some nice pictures in it are O.K. but unnecessary especially if it adds to the price. It's the same with a web host and web site scenario. You want to get the right deal for you, enough space and enough access to the public that you wish to associate with. As a novice who doesn't understand all the jargon this can pose a problem. Are you an individual, small business, blog, or a big time corporation? What do you need and how do you get it? As far as I can tell the web hosting business is a lot like the fast food business. The big corporations have strict guidelines, will offer you special deals, and have monthly 'cheeseburger specials'. But, I've always been more interested in the 'Mom and Pop' small time diners who have that real caring human approach. You know you are a customer and a person, not just a number on a sales receipt. I believe the hosting companies are the same. A smaller hosting company will probably treat its users with more honest integrity as well as having more flexibility in dealing with your individual situation. They can often tailor web site packages to accommodate exactly what you are looking for as well as the ability to update them quickly when your needs change. My advice is to contact a few of the smaller companies. Look for ones with good reputations or just arbitrarily email them and compare results from different places. Which one do you feel most comfortable with? Go for it; ask as many questions as you can, see how the different hosts differ in their answers. Try one; if it doesn't work out try another, it's really easy to move around. Don't be afraid, you've got nothing to lose except the fear itself!

Go Daddy is an Internet domain registrar and web hosting company that also sells e-business related software and services. In 2009, it reached more than 36 million domain names under management. Go Daddy is currently the largest ICANN-accredited registrar in the world, and is three times the size of its closest competitor..
Known for its racy marketing, Go Daddy started advertising in the Super Bowl in 2005. Since then, the company expanded its marketing to include sports sponsorships.
Go Daddy filed for an IPO in 2006, but later cancelled it, due to “market uncertainties.
Go Daddy claims it wants to protect the Internet, but some of their actions have drawn the criticism of others.

History

Go Daddy was founded in 1997 as Jomax Technologies by Bob Parsons, who previously founded the software development company Parsons Technology, Inc. The company changed its name to Go Daddy in 1999 when a group of employees were brainstorming on a more memorable name than Jomax Technologies. Someone said "How about Big Daddy?" A quick check revealed that it was taken. Then Parsons said "How about Go Daddy?" The name was available, so he bought it. CEO Bob Parsons states the company stuck with the name because it made people smile and remember it.
Go Daddy has grown to become the largest ICANN-accredited registrar on the internet^. In 2001, soon after Network Solutions was no longer the only place to register a domain, Go Daddy was approximately the same size as competitors Dotster and eNom.In April 2005 it surpassed Network Solutions in market share in terms of total domain names registered. By 2009, Go Daddy had become 3.5 times the size of eNom and 30 times the size of Dotster.
In 2002, Go Daddy sued VeriSign for domain slamming and again in 2003 over its Site Finder service.This latter suit caused controversy over VeriSign's role as the sole maintainer of the .com and the .net top-level domains. VeriSign shut down Site Finder after receiving a letter from ICANN ordering it to comply with a request to disable the service. In 2006, Go Daddy was sued by Web.com for patent infringement.
In 2007 and 2008, the company lobbied in favor of legislation that would crack down on unscrupulous online pharmacies and child predators.

Awards

In 2009, Go Daddy was listed as the #1 Software Company and the "Best of the Best" technology company by Ranking Arizona USA.
In 2009 Go Daddy was voted "Best Registrar" Domain Name Wire annual survey for the 4th consecutive year.
Go Daddy won the 'Best Perks' category in AZCentral.com's 3rd Annual Readers' Choice Awards for 2009 and was listed among the "Best Places to Work in the Valley" for five consecutive years (2003–2008)
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A domain name registrar is an organization or commercial entity, accredited by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) or by a national country code top-level domain (ccTLD) authority, to manage the reservation of Internet domain names in accordance with the guidelines of the designated domain name registries and offer such services to the public.

Designated registrar

An end-user cannot directly register a domain and manage their domain information with ICANN. A designated registrar must be chosen. Prior to 1999, the only com registrar was NSI, but the approval of the SRS opened up the opportunity for other companies to be designated as registrars.
Each ICANN-accredited registrar must pay a fixed fee of US$4,000 plus a variable fee. The sum of variable registrar fees are designed to total US$3.8 million.
Only the designated registrar may modify or delete information about a domain name. The competition that the SRS created enables end users to choose from many registrars offering different services at varying prices. It is not unusual for an end user to switch registrars which invokes a domain transfer process governed by specific domain name transfer policies.
When a registrar registers a com domain name for an end-user, it must pay a maximum annual fee of US$6.86 to VeriSign, the registry operator for com, and a US$0.20 administration fee to ICANN. Most domain registrars price their services and products to address both the annual fees and the administration fees that must be paid to ICANN. Barriers to entry into the bulk registrar industry are high for new companies without an existing customer base.^{[citation needed]}
Many registrars also offer registration through reseller affiliates. An end-user registers either directly with a registrar, or indirectly through one or more layers of resellers. As of 2008, the cost generally ranges from a low of about $7.50 per year to about $35 per year. The maximum period of registration of a domain name is generally 10 years.
Some registrars are offering longer periods of up to one hundred years, but such offers involve the registrar renewing the registration for their customer. The one hundred year domain name registration would not be in the official registration database. Some packages of Internet services, such as web hosting, include the domain registration in the total package pricing.

Domain name transfer

A Domain name transfer is the process of changing the designated registrar of a domain name. ICANN has defined a Policy on Transfer of Registrations between Registrars^[1] The usual process of a domain name transfer is:

1. The end user verifies that the whois admin contact info is correct, particularly the email address; obtains the authentication code (EPP transfer code) from the old registrar, and removes any domain lock that has been placed on the registration.
2. The end user contacts the new registrar with the wish to transfer the domain name to their service, and supplies the authentication code.
3. The new registrar will contact the old registrar with this information.
4. The old registrar will contact the end user to confirm the authenticity of this request. The end user may have to take further action with the old registrar, such as returning to the online management tools, to re-iterate their desire to proceed, in order to expedite the transfer.
5. The old registrar will release authority to the new registrar.
6. The new registrar will notify the end user of transfer completion. The new registrar may have automatically copied over the domain server information, and everything on the website will continue to work as before. Otherwise, the domain server information will need to be updated with the new registrar.

After this process, the new registrar becomes the domain name's designated registrar. The process may take about five days. In some cases, the old registrar may intentionally delay the transfer as long as allowable. After transfer, the domain cannot be transferred again for 60 days, except back to the previous registrar.
It is unwise to attempt to transfer a domain immediately before it expires. In some cases, a transfer can take up to 14 days, meaning that the transfer may not complete before the registration expires. This could result in loss of the domain name registration and failure of the transfer. To avoid this, end users should either transfer well before the expiration date, or renew the registration before attempting the transfer.[1]
If a domain registration expires, irrespective of the reason, it can be difficult, expensive, or impossible for the original owner to get it back. After the expiration date, the domain status often passes through several management phases, often for a period of months; usually it does not simply become generally available.^{[citation needed]}

Transfer scams

With the introduction of SRS, many smaller registrars had to compete with each other. Some companies offered value added services or used viral marketing, while others, such as VeriSign and the Domain Registry of America attempted to trick customers to switch from their current registrar using a practice known as domain slamming.
Many of these transfer scams involve a notice sent in the mail, fax, or e-mail. Some scammers contacted end users by telephone (since the contact information is available through WHOIS) to obtain more information. These notices would include information publicly available from the WHOIS database to add to the look of authenticity. The text would include legalese to confuse the end user into thinking that it is an official binding notice. Scam registrars go after domain names that are expiring soon or have recently expired. Expired domain names do not have to go through the authentication process to be transferred, as the previous registrar would have relinquished management rights of the domain name. Domain name expiry dates are readily available via WHOIS.

Top-Level Domains
The top-level domains (TLDs) are the highest level of domain names of the Internet. They form the DNS root zone of the hierarchical Domain Name System. Every domain name ends in a top-level or first-level domain label.
When the Domain Name System was created in the 1980s, the domain name space was divided into two main groups of domains.^[1] The country code top-level domains (ccTLD) were primarily based on the two-character territory codes of ISO-3166 country abbreviations. In addition, a group of seven generic top-level domains (gTLD) was implemented which represented a set of categories of names and multi-organizations.^[2] These were the domains GOV, EDU, COM, MIL, ORG, NET, and INT.
During the growth of the Internet, it became desirable to create additional generic top-level domains. As of June 2009, there are 20 generic top-level domains and 248 country code top-level domains.^[3] In addition, the ARPA domain serves technical purposes in the infrastructure of the Domain Name System.
During the 32nd International Public ICANN Meeting in Paris in 2008,^[4] ICANN started a new process of TLD naming policy to take a "significant step forward on the introduction of new generic top-level domains." This program envisions the availability of many new or already proposed domains, as well a new application and implementation process.^[5] Observers believed that the new rules could result in hundreds of new top-level domain to be registered.^[6]
An annotated list of top-level domains in the root zone database is published at the IANA website at http://www.iana.org/domains/root/db/ and a Wikipedia list exists.
 
Second-level and lower level domains
Below the top-level domains in the domain name hierarchy are the second-level domain (SLD) names. These are the names directly to the left of .com, .net, and the other top-level domains. As an example, in the domain en.wikipedia.org, wikipedia is the second-level domain.
Next are third-level domains, which are written immediately to the left of a second-level domain. There can be fourth- and fifth-level domains, and so on, with virtually no limitation. An example of an operational domain name with four levels of domain labels is www.sos.state.oh.us. The www preceding the domains is the host name of the World-Wide Web server. Each label is separated by a full stop (dot). 'sos' is said to be a sub-domain of 'state.oh.us', and 'state' a sub-domain of 'oh.us', etc. In general, subdomains are domains subordinate to their parent domain. An example of very deep levels of subdomain ordering are the IPv6 reverse resolution DNS zones, e.g., 1.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.ip6.arpa, which is the reverse DNS resolution domain name for the IP address of a loopback interface, or the localhost name.
Second-level (or lower-level, depending on the established parent hierarchy) domain names are often created based on the name of a company (e.g., microsoft.com), product or service (e.g., gmail.com). Below these levels, the next domain name component has been used to designate a particular host server. Therefore, ftp.wikipedia.org might be an FTP server, www.wikipedia.org would be a World Wide Web server, and mail.wikipedia.org could be an email server, each intended to perform only the implied function. Modern technology allows multiple physical servers with either different (cf. load balancing) or even identical addresses (cf. anycast) to serve a single hostname or domain name, or multiple domain names to be served by a single computer. The latter is very popular in Web hosting service centers, where service providers host the websites of many organizations on just a few servers.

A domain name is an identification label that defines a realm of administrative autonomy, authority, or control in the Internet, based on the Domain Name System (DNS).
Domain names are used in various networking contexts and application-specific naming and addressing purposes. They are organized in subordinate levels (subdomains) of the DNS root domain, which is nameless. The first-level set of domain names are the top-level domains (TLDs), including the generic top-level domains (gTLDs), such as the prominent domains com, net and org, and the country code top-level domains (ccTLDs). Below these top-level domains in the DNS hierarchy are the second-level and third-level domain names that are typically open for reservation by end-users that wish to connect local area networks to the Internet, run web sites, or create other publicly accessible Internet resources. The registration of these domain names is usually administered by domain name registrars who sell their services to the public.
Individual Internet host computers use domain names as host identifiers, or hostnames. Hostnames are the leaf labels in the domain name system usually without further subordinate domain name space. Hostnames appear as a component in Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) for Internet resources such as web sites (e.g., en.wikipedia.org).
Domain names are also used as simple identification labels to indicate ownership or control of a resource. Such examples are the realm identifiers used in the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), the DomainKeys used to verify DNS domains in e-mail systems, and in many other Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs).
An important purpose of domain names is to provide easily recognizable and memorizable names to numerically addressed Internet resources. This abstraction allows any resource (e.g., website) to be moved to a different physical location in the address topology of the network, globally or locally in an intranet. Such a move usually requires changing the IP address of a resource and the corresponding translation of this IP address to and from its domain name.
Domain names are often referred to simply as domains and domain name registrants are frequently referred to as domain owners, although domain name registration with a registrar does not confer any legal ownership of the domain name, only an exclusive right of use.
This article primarily discusses the group of domain names that are offered by domain name registrars for registration by the public. The Domain Name System article discusses the technical facilities and infrastructure of the domain name space and the hostname article deals with specific information about the use of domain names as identifiers of network hosts.
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