This page explains how to get your own Domain Name and put your own page on the World Wide Web. The description assumes you are planning a personal or family web site. If you are a business, then the same steps apply, but you can bank on higher fees for everything.

First, a definition: Domain Name is the end part of the web page address - in our case it is "astell.ca". A Domain Name is composed of a Top Level Domain (TLD) plus the part you want to customize - in our case it is our family name. There are many TLDs, the most famous is the .com which is used by American businesses as well as businesses around the world in recent years. The other TLDs are .org, .net, .mil, .edu plus a bunch of others which I can't remember. There are also the country code TLDs which are of particular interest to those of us who aren't American. In our case, the Canadian TLD is .ca. It is important to remember that Domain Names have to be registered with the controlling body (more on that below) which is responsible for the TLD you want to use. Once you have the Domain Name registered, you can add sub-Domain Names, for instance parents.astell.ca and kids.astell.ca. This page doesn't go into sub-Domains - I am assuming that if you are reading this page, you are a newbie to Domain Names.

I have split the explanation into two sections:

What you need to check or obtain before you start

You need 6 things to get a web page on the World Wide Web with your own page with your customized Domain Name.

1. Choose the TLD you want to use as the end of your Domain Name. In most cases you will probably use the country code for your country of residence. Of course, you can use .com, .org, .net if you want to.
2. Check whether your preferred Domain Name is still free - ie has somebody else already registered that Domain Name? To perform the check, you have to go onto the website of the controlling body for the chosen TLD and use the link that they provide. It is usually called "Whois". If you perform a "Whois" search it will report who has registered the Domain Name. Obviously, if it returns nothing, the Domain Name is available. The controlling body for the American Domain Names (.com, .net, .org etc) is www.internic.com. The controlling body for Canadian Domain Names is www.cira.ca. There are a lot of other controlling bodies for all the other TLDs, so I won't list them here.
3. Find a Domain Name Service (DNS) provider. The DNS protocol tranlates the person friendly "www.astell.ca" address into the computer format 206.191.32.152 style of address. The numeric format is called an IP address and is how computers route data between computers on the Internet. The DNS provider keeps a record of your domain name and the IP address of the computer which is hosting your web page. Without a DNS provider, nobody can reach your Domain Name, even if you have registered the Domain Name. What I mean is that if somebody types in www.astell.ca after I have registered the Domain Name, but have not yet got a DNS provider, all they will get is an error message.  So, choosing your DNS provider is a very important part of the process. There are many DNS providers around - maybe your ISP will provide the DNS translation for you (you may have to pay) or you can use a third party. I used www.mydomain.com  as my DNS provider since they are free and they seem to offer a good set of services for you to manage your Domain Name and the email addresses that go with it (more on that below).
4. Find a Domain Name Registrar who can register your chosen Domain Name with the controlling body who controls the TLD in your Domain Name. Not all Registrars can register all TLDs. For instance, most American Registrars only register .com, .net, .org etc, but they can't register a .ca Domain Name. The choice of Registrar is based upon price (they vary quite a lot!) and location. I chose a Registrar in my home city simply so that I could pick up the phone and call them in the event of a problem. Many Registrars also let you check whether the Domain Name is free, so you can perform step 2 at the Registrar's web site.
5. Get a Web Page Host. Often your ISP will host web pages for you, but there are a number of free Web Hosting services available such as www.geocities.com.
6. Then you need to create a Web Page. There are numerous packages available to author and publish Web Pages and I have only tried one - Microsoft Frontpage. I wouldn't recommend it since it is very limiting and frustrating to use. On the other hand, it is quite easy to get a simple site up and running in a short period of time.

Still with me? I hope so, because now we've done the ground work, here's what to do to get the Domain Name registered and active on the Web.

What you need to do

1. Create your web pages and upload the pages to your Web Page Hosting service. Check that it is working and make sure that you know what is the URL. If you are using your ISP, then the address will probably look something like: "www.yourISP.com/~yourloginid".
2. Register with your DNS provider. The critical piece of information that you need from your DNS provider is the DNS server IDs (sometimes called nameserver IDs or nameservers). There will be at least 2, maybe as many as 4. In the case of mydomain.com, the server IDs are ns1.mydomain.com, ns2.mydomain.com etc.
3. Register your Domain Name using your chosen Registrar. When you are filling out the application form, you will need the DNS server IDs. This is the only step where you have to pay something - it is possible to get the other services for free.
4. Configure your DNS provider so that www.yourdomain.com points to your web site - the "www.yourISP.com/~yourloginid" address. You can also set up your email addresses so that, say, george@yourdomain.com points to George's normal email address. I recommend this step after step 3 in case there is a problem with the registration process.

Once you have all the steps completed, it could take 24 to 48 hours before anyone anywhere in the world can just type www.yourdomain.com in their browser and your web page will pop up. There is a lot of variability in how each step of the process is implemented, but once you are up and running, you can usually go back and tinker with things until everything is as you want.