After you have chosen a good domain name for your website or blog etc you will also need to check the availability of the chosen domain name. Simply put, you will also need to check if somebody has already registered that same domain name you have chosen for your website or blog. It should be noted that if another person has already registered your chosen domain name (yourdomainname.com) you will have to choose another domain name for your website . Just like when creating an email account, if a particular username you intend to use has already been taken (already exist), you won,t be allowed to use the name and you will be asked to choose another username. Thats the same way domain name (web address) work.
Domain names are totally unique just like our phone numbers. Two websites or blogs can’t use or share the same domain name. Thats why before you can register a domain name with any domain registrar, the first thing you will need to do, is to check whether the domain name you intend to register is still available (not yet taken).
In the next lesson you will learn how to check the availability of your chosen domain name.
How to check domain name availability .
To check the availability of your chosen domain name, simply go to www.godaddy.com. Incase you haven,t heard, GoDaddy is a popular domain registration website (a domain registrar).
At the centre of the GoDaddy website, you will find a very long search box; that’s the GoDaddy domain name checker. The Godaddy domain name checker will enable you to check if your chosen domain name has already been registered or not.
To check the availability of your chosen domain name, just simply type your chosen domain name in to that domain name search bar (checker) and click on the search button.
Let,s take for example that the domain name i wish to register for my website is solowayne.com. To check the availability of the domain name, i will simply type the domain name in to the domain name checker (the search box) and click on the search button as shown in the screenshot below.
After you have clicked on that search button, the Godaddy domain name checker will search the domain name register of all the available domain name registrars to see whether somebody has already registered the domain name. As you can see from the screenshot below, the Godaddy domain name checker tells me that my choosen domain name has not been registered. You can see the message that says YES! Your domain is available. Buy it before someone else does. Since my domain name is still available (not yet registered), i can now proceed to register it if i want to.
On otherhand if your choosen domain name has already been registered, the domain name checker will give you a message like yourdomain.com is taken
For example if you type facebook.com or any domain name that has already been registered in to the domain name search box, this is what the search result will look like.
It should be noted that its possible to register a particular name with different domain extensions. So if you check the availability of a domain name with the .com extension and you realised that the .com extension of the domain name has already been registered, you can check whether other extensions of the domain name is still available. For example if facebook.com is taken, i will also check if facebook.org, facebook.net and other extensions of the name (facebook) is still available. Whenever a domain name is taken, a domain name checker will always provide you with suggestions of other extensions of the domain name that are still available.
Even though its possible to register a domain with different extensions, its always good to register your domain name with the .com extension. Internet users are very familiar with the .com extension than the .org, .net, .info, .tv and other domain extensions. Immediately most internet users remember the name of a website, they just type it to their web browser with the .com extension. So if you register your domain name with .org and other extensions, your website will always loose traffic to the website of the person who registered the name with the .com extension.
