Domain Name registrations and Name Servers Registration

Domain Name Registration

Get started with owning your own domain name quick and easy! Register today Hostitwise makes it easy to register a domain name with our simple registration process, and a domain name costs only $11.95 per year.

All Inclusive Domain Name Package
Hostitwise.com Offers More Value Added Services with each Domain Name
Modify Contact Info, Registrar Lock, Auto Renew, and Update Domain Password

Domain Name Control Panel
Easy and powerful control panel allows you to manage all you domain names from one central place.

Auto-Renew
Don't ever let your domain expire because you simply forgot. Turn on auto-renew and we'll attempt to renew it for you a few days before expiration.

Registrar Lock
Avoid any transfer mistakes and the loss of your domain. If a domain name has "registrar lock" turned on. Transfers won't be able to go through until you turn it off.

What is Name Servers

A name server is an Internet host running software capable of processing DNS requests. A popular free software name server is BIND Named, for UN*X hosts.

Primary and Secondary Name Servers
Typically, a single name server will be configured as the primary name server for a domain. For backup purposes, a number of other name servers may be configured as secondary name servers. From the standpoint of DNS, there is no difference between primary and secondary name servers, since the resolving algorithm simply uses a domain's NS records in the order provided. Typically, the primary name server is listed first, followed by the secondaries, but this is not a requirement. In fact, if a group of domains is served by a set of name servers, the ordering of the name servers may be mixed among the domains, to facilitate load balancing.

A domain's primary name server will have a file on disk containing the RR definitions for that domain. Typically, secondary name servers do not have to be known to the primary. However, some sites, not wishing to publicly distribute copies of their entire domain, restrict zone transfers to preconfigured hosts. Secondary name servers depend on zone transfers for their operation.

Typically, a secondary name server will perform a zone transfer to acquire a complete copy of the primary's RR database, often saving this copy on disk. Periodically, the primary's SOA record for the domain is checked for changes in its SERIAL field. Upon detecting a change, the secondary performs another zone transfer to acquire the updated information. Therefore, the SERIAL field in a domain's SOA record must be changed every time a change is made within the domain.

The timing of secondary updates is governed by several fields in the domain's SOA record. The secondaries check the primary's NS record every REFRESH seconds. If one can not perform a scheduled check, it retries every RETRY seconds. If a check can't be performed for EXPIRE seconds, then all the secondary's records for that domain are discarded, and it begins to return errors to lookup requests.

DNS (Domain Name System)

DNS stands for Domain Name System. The DNS is the system by which all Internet service addresses are created, maintained, and used.

Under the Domain Name System, an Internet address has four elements; a server prefix, a domain name, a domain suffix (or extension), and a country code (the only optional element).

The Domain Name System, or DNS, was implemented by ARPAnet in 1984, and is managed by InterNIC (the Internet Network Information Center), based in Virginia. InterNIC, in turn, is operated by ICANN, the non-profit corporation that oversees the DNS.

Top Level Domain TLD

Under the Domain Name System, an Internet address has four elements; a server prefix, a domain name, a domain suffix (or extension), and a country code (the only optional element). A TLD or top level domain, therefore, would consistently follow the naming convention of something such as "http://www.hostitwise.com".

For years, there were only a few top level domains, such as .com (for commerce), .gov (for government), and .org (for organization). (You can see how the DNS simplifed domain names; if you saw .gov as part of the web site address, you knew you were dealing with a government site.)