How to register domain name

All online adventure starts with buying/registering domain name. Domain name is the foundation of your online business as it represents not only your website name/URL (www.example.com) but also your brand. It’s better to say that we register domain instead of buying domain as you register it only for a limited period of time (a month, a year, etc.). But of course, you can set the parameter as “automatically renewed” to keep your domain yours as long as you want it. In this article, I’ll show you how to register a domain name with Bluehost. Bluehost is what is called “domain name registrar”, ie a company who allows you to officially register your desired website domain name so that it is unique to you, booked for you and to you.

Step1: Identify your domain name

Remember! Choosing carefully your domain name is important as you will be known through it later! It’s your brand, your identity, your image. It should make sens somehow and people can guess what your site is about through the domain name. In our case, I’ll look for “marketingdaffiliation.com” if it’s still available.

I’ll open www.bluehost.com and I’ll tape “marketingdaffiliation.com” in the search field. As you see below, the domain name “marketingdaffiliation.com” is taken, Bluehost proposes a list of available domain name for me, I’ll pick up the ”
marketingdaffiliation.net” one.

Step2: Register your domain name with or without protection

I’ve chosen “marketingdaffiiation.net” as my domain name and I’m happy with it.

Now, when I add it to my card, the option “privacy + protection” is added automatically, making the total in the card $24.87 (domain purchase 1 year = $12.99 and privacy+protection = $11.88).

Here, you have the choice of keeping that option or deleting it to pay only the domain purchase which is $12.99. If you want to host your domain within Blueshost, then I recommend you keep and buy it. But if you want to host your domain in other place out of Bluehost, you can delete this option. I’ll explain later the difference between registering domain name and hosting domain name.

Step3: Checking out

For the purpose of this training, I’ll delete the option “privacy+protection” and I’ll check out at only $12.99.

I click on “proceed” and that brings me to the below page.

I continue with “Proceed to Checkout”. Microsoft Office 365 is proposed as alternative plans here, but we don’t care about it for now and proceed to checkout directly.

Step4: Payment

The next page shows you payment information where you must enter some personal data such as address, name, country and phone number.

And then choose a payment method,

After filling the information, we click on “Purchase now” (in the picture above).

Step5: Go to control panel of Bluehost

Then we arrive at this “congratulations” page, we click on “Go to Control Panel” where we can manage our domain parameters.

The first thing we have to do is to create our Bluehost account. For that, we need to define our password and confirm it. Then click on “Create Account”.

Step6: Log in into your new account on Bluehost

After creating your account, you have to login into it.

After logged in successfully, we’ll be proposed to start free trial of domain Privacy + Protection (for 1 month without engagement), the offer that we deleted when we purchased our domain earlier, As they state “You won’t be charged or auto-renewed at the end of this trial”, we have no risk accepting to start our free trial.

Step7: Navigating within your Bluehost account control panel

We can now navigate throughout our account control panel. We can explain a bit the 4 paramaters/buttons here:

1) Notice the expiration date under our domain name “marketingdaffiliation.net”, as I said earlier the domain name registration is for 1 year, we can renew it as we want manually before the expiration date or automatically (in the “renewal” parameter under “manage”.

2) If we click on “Manage” we find in the scroll-down menu some parameters to configure our account if needed. Notice the “DNS” parameter where we can configure the name servers if we decide to host the domain name outside of Bluehost.

3) The button “Transfer Domain” is useful when you want to transfer the domain name to another registrar (other than Bluehost) for a specific reason. This is very rare, because you can always host your domain with other DNS hosting company.

4) If you want to buy register another domain name (meaning another website) with Bluehost.

Conclusion

Now, you should know how to register a domain name with Bluehost. It’s very similar with the other registrars’ platforms.

Congratulations and keep up the good work, taking your Business to the Next Level!

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