As I promised in my previous post, “Domain Name Research and Selection“, I’m going to talk about the domain name redirection and the addon domain in the hosting account.

When you purchase a domain (I purchase all mine from GoDaddy.com, so that is where my examples will come from), it is not pointed to any particular site.  You need to redirect it to point to the desired site.  You can simple forward the domain, which is the simplest way to redirect your domain, but limits you in the use of subdomains later.  I choose to redirect using a two step method that is slightly more complicated to set up, but allows more flexibility with the use of subdomains.

First, login to your GoDaddy account and navigate to Domains-My Domains.  There you will see a list of all the domains that you have purchased through GoDaddy.  Click on the domain that you are wishing to redirect.

In the section of the page entitled “Nameservers”, there should be 2 listed.  You need to change those nameserver names to those that your hosting account provides for you.  Since I use HostGator which uses a program called cPanel as it’s control panel, that is what I will be describing here. It looks something like this:

At the very bottom of the screen on the left, you will find a little box that provides all the details of your hosting account.  There you will find the nameservers that you will need in your GoDaddy redirection.

Back in GoDaddy, click on the “manage” link by the Nameservers area of your domain.  This takes you to a place where you can change the nameservers to your assigned nameserver names at your hosting account.  Once you have saved this change, it takes 24 to 48 hours before the redirection is completed.  I like to do this as soon as I purchase the domain so that I can get that process moving along and use my new domain as quickly as possible.

The second step in the process is done in your hosting account’s control panel (hostgator-cpanel for me).  On the home page, of cPanel, scroll down to the section entitled “Domains”.

Click on the Addon Domains button.  This will let you set up the location in your hosting account that your domain will be redirected to.  It looks like this:

type in your domain, then tab down to password.  The other fields will self populate.  Verify your password and click add domain, then you’re done.

No your domain is ready for you to upload your website.  That will be for another post.

I already have a hosting account, so I didn’t have to purchase hosting.  I have an account with HostGator and have had for some time now.  For only $7.95 per month, I purchased an account with them that offers unlimited domains, so each time I want to start in a new niche, all I have to do is purchase a domain name, redirect it to my nameservers in HostGator, and create an addon domain in my hosting account.

Yesterday, I researched some available domain names and purchased one that I felt was appropriate for my “learn to play guitar” niche.  To do that research, I used a site called NameBoy.com and their two word search tool.

NameBoy lets you enter two keywords into their search and then it provides a large group of suggestions.  They display .com, .net, .org, .info, and more.  They also indicate the availability of the domain with each extension.

I, also, used GoDaddy’s search to help me find the domain.

When you search a specific domain in GoDaddy, they will tell you if it is available, but they also give many domain name suggestions to choose from.

It’s not that easy to find a real good domain name, especially one with a .com extension, which I recommend highly.  Keep searching until you find something appropriate.  Think about synonyms, hyphenation between words, and addon words like my, best, now, online, etc.  Godaddy uses that technique in their domain suggestion tool.

I ended up purchasing the domain myjamminguitar.com for this exercise.

I’ll go into domain redirection and addon domains in my next post.