17 of 26

Thanks to my wife, I was off to DreamHost to register my domain name.  After using their tool to make sure that the domain name was available (phew!) I set up my account, gave them my credit card information, and created the domain.  I got a confirmation email that said “Your domain should be registered within 30 minutes, and you will receive another email confirmation when complete!”.  Sure enough, 10 minutes later I was notified of a successful registration.  Yay, I had my own domain!

Now the only thing left to do was to set the DNS information for the domain since I wasn’t also using DreamHost to host my domain.  However, before I could do that I needed to head over to Host Gator and set up my web hosting.  The process there was very simple as well.  I created an account, chose the hosting plan I wanted and gave them my credit card information.  Within a few minutes, I received a confirmation email telling me that my account was all set and they gave me the IP address and a temporary URL I could use to access my domain until DNS was properly resolving my domain name.  They also provided me with the DNS information that I needed to give to DreamHost.

Armed with the DNS information from Host Gator, I logged onto my DreamHost account and updated the information there.  DreamHost said it may take up to 24-48 hours for the DNS information to propagate.  Being the impatient person that I am, about an hour later I opened up my browser and typed in “17of26.com”.  It worked!  All I got was a blank HTML page because I hadn’t set anything up yet, but my domain was alive.

Next:  Configuring my Domain