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There are many domain name registration sites where you can enter the domain you would like and search for the results. One thing to note is that many websites offer this free service for searching for the domains. They also offer the paid service of registering the domain and hosting the website. It's best to have a single company handle registering the domain and also hosting your website. Changing your domain from one company to another is possible, but it can be a bit of a hassle.

Check out https://www.domaindiscover.com/ or http://www.1and1.com for just two of the many sites.

Your ISP (Internet Service Provider) may also offer this service, often for a reduced price. Our domain is hosted by Panix ([www.panix.com|http://www.panix.com]), who are very technically savvy and also offer Web site hosting, e-mail, etc.

GoDaddy.com is a great website, but they mainly a reseller from Wild West Domains. The service is the same for several other Domain Registrars such as http://www.HomeSiteNames.com which can be cheaper than GoDaddy at times. Buying a domain name from one or the other makes no difference in service, but you can compare prices to save you a few bucks. Each service can mark up there own prices for more of a profit margin. There are other Registrars out there as well that resell for Wild West Domains, so you can shop around.

For names availability you can check godaddy.com, register.com, 1and1.com
the price per domain names starts as low as 2.99$ per year if you purchase domain name with .info extension. Also, those domain providers, offer hosting for your website for as low as 5$ per month (1and1)

If you plan to have a business with large e-commerce factor, my advice is buy domain names packages - all or as much as possible domain names that are phonetically associated with your name

If by chance your desired domain name is already taken you can use a domain buying agent (it is easy to notice it - at godaddy it pops up right after the notice 'daomain name is taken' ) . Price of some good domain names - generic words - are in the range of few thousads dollars ... but with a little creativity you can find a good available name.

if you want memorable yet cheap (i mean free) and available name try with googlepages.com, blogger.com wordpress.com .. easy to make websites/blogs .. for free ...and very likely to have good names available. The only inconvenience will be that your name will look something like mydomain.googlepages.com
- a combination of your chosen name and the name of the hosting entity.
hope this info was helpful

Have a good one

WhiteBrow, we use http://www.abcEasyDomains.com, I'ts a Wild West Domains reseller similar to godaddy, however as someone mentioned there are times that some resellers are cheaper than godaddy for the same exact products.

Also, when people mention "cheaper" in this thread, it should only be a matter of $1 or $2 cheaper. You should not have to pay more than $9 or $10/yr for a .com or .net domain name.

A few suggestions:

Always purchase the .com and the .net if available. Most of the other TLD's (.info, .org, .tv, etc.) are good to have to prevent anyone from using them but the .com and .net are most important.

The most difficult part of the domain name purchasing process is searching finding the right name thats available. abcEasyDomains.com offers an Advanced Search feature that provides you with a list of available domain name options to choose from by entering key words.

Keep your domain name as short as possible and avoid including hyphens if possible eg. my-domain-name.com

Good luck!

I wouldn't trust the majority of the websites mentioned above, as a lot of them are used for domain harvesting. Go directly to the source, Verisign, and use http://www.internic.net/whois.html. This queries the whois database directly. When registering a domain name, go with a trusted source, such as Network Solutions, which has a large stake in the domain registration market. Even GoDaddy has had quite a few large complaints for hijacking domains for days due to "abuse". An example of this is available for your listening pleasure at http://marc.perkel.com/audio/godaddy.mp3

Best Regards,
Alexander McMillen
Sliqua Enterprise Hosting, Inc.
1-877-4SLIQUA x201
amcmillen@sliqua.com
http://www.sliqua.com/

Let's look at the worst case scenario here. Say your hosting provider (who you registered your domain with) goes belly up, and your website is down.

If you can't access your domain registration settings to change things like name servers to another hosting provider, your website will remain down until you can get in contact with your current hosting company to transfer away the domain. And even if you attempt to force a domain transfer, the entire process can take upwards of a week.

Registering your domain from a 3rd party source allows you to move your domain wherever you need to, when you need to, without relying on your current hosting provider for anything.

A great example of a domain nightmare was in my previous post. The domain registration provider GoDaddy was the registrar for a datacenter which hosts thousands of websites. A single server on their network was hacked, and GoDaddy decided to take it upon themselves to hijack the domain. Marc Perkel was unable to get the domain working again for 72 hours (I believe). Thus, all of the websites hosted at that datacenter remained down.

Best Regards,,
Alexander McMillen
Sliqua Enterprise Hosting, Inc.
1-877-4SLIQUA x201
amcmillen@sliqua.com
http://www.sliqua.com/