Quote:Original post by icecubeflower
I just registered icecubeflower.com with register.com but I've been doing some reading and I'm starting to think that was pretty dumb. It looks like they charge more for no apparent reason.

The reason is that you pay for ease of access—the additional fee corresponds to the time you did not have to spend searching for a cheaper registrar. In practice, all .com registrars will charge you at least $6.25 for every registration. The registrar list is available on the VeriSign website: link.

Quote:And I cannot make any sense out of all the things I find about web hosts. This whole thing just seems like a breeding ground for scam artists. So can anyone tell me who is an honest web host before I make another dumb decision? Does it depend on where you live? If I live in St. Louis then are there local hosts I should choose from or should I just go with yahoo or somebody?

You most probably want a host which is close to your geographical location, so that your access to your website is faster.

Then, the basic criteria for comparing web hosts are the price and the feature set. Look at several web hosts, compare them together, look at critical reviews for them, and go with the one which seemed better.

Quote:I don't even get the whole domain registration thing, it makes no sense to me. Why are companies getting money for doing nothing. I think the government should register domain names. Or maybe I should get in on the action and become a domain name registerer.

Which government? I mean, clearly the Nigerian government should be responsible for .com domain names. Or perhaps the Chinese government.

Being a registrar is not "doing nothing": you have to process claims, publish the DNS data, publish the WHOIS data, make sure no two people register the same domain name, and prove that you're doing it correctly so that you keep your registrar status. Getting paid $10 for doing this is definitely nothing shocking!

Quote:Hey, I'll sell you guys domain names a buck a piece. Let me know if you're interested.

You have to pay VeriSign $6 for every .com domain name (otherwise, they have no reason to bind your domain name to your IP, do they?) and the ICANN $0.25 for administrative fees related to protecting you from domain name theft by other entities. Besides, you also have to prove that you're a correct registrar (for instance, you don't scam people, and you respect the basic rules). But if you wish to sell me a domain name with a $5.25 rebate, I certainly am interested.

I use namecheap for their great web hosting rates and have yet to see anything scammy there or elsewhere...

gamedev.net also apparently has hosting.

Quote:Original post by icecubeflower
So is in control of the master list?

At the highest level, it's the ICANN, which then delegates top-level domains to individual registrars (for .com, that would be VeriSign) which in turn delegate registration to secondary registrars such as namecheap.com or register.com.

Quote:Original post by icecubeflower
Well then what's the point in having all these separate companies div out all the .com's. Why can't ICANN just handle it?

ICANN is responsible for supervising the domain registration process—and you cannot reliably supervise something if you're the one doing that thing. So, ICANN handles the high-level administrative details of deciding whether the top-level domain registrars are doing their job, and that's all.

Then, there's the issue of hosting companies: it's much easier to have the customer pay, at the same time, for both his domain name and his hosting. This is only possible if the hosting company is somehow allowed to buy a domain for a customer, which is why it was allowed. Conversely, it's also much easier for the top-level domain registrars to have a corporate-only interface (inaccessible to normal users because they don't have the time or knowledge to fill in the data correctly) and let the individual registrars handle the end user requests and bill them.

Quote:And if my idea of having the government do it is wrong then where is ICANN? Is ICANN a company or a branch of the government?

The ICANN is a non-profit corporation—while technically declared on the American soil, it does not obey the US government as much as it collaborates with it.

Quote:If some company can be in charge of all the domains then why not just put the US government in charge of it and get rid of all these stupid little domain registrars.

There's an extremely simple reason for this: international law. Who decides what IP the domain icecubeflower.com redirects to? Ultimately, it's the government of the country the visitor lives in, which can coerce ISPs into using a certain DNS description instead of another. Would it be acceptable for each country to have its own set of .com domains? No, it would not, because you would then have to register your domain name in every country (and things would cost far, far more than a simple VeriSign + ICANN registration, because the government of Farawayistan has no reason to provide a free service to an US taxpayer).

Therefore, the countries have to agree on a common list, which will involve delegating the creation and handling of that list to some entity or another. However, a government is not a valid candidate, because no country wants to delegate its internal affairs to the government of another country! If the US government decided tomorrow that it is now in charge of .com domain name allocation, then the Chinese government could just as well say the same thing, just like any other national government—the end result being that each country has its own registration system.

As a consequence, the simplest solution to handle a common list is to create an artificial entity which is government-independent. This is the reason why the ICANN exists.

Quote:Original post by icecubeflower
I don't get it.

Assume that the US government (or a dependent agency) decides to attribute the domain icecubeflower.com to you. An American visiting icecubeflower.com accesses your website. Someone from anywhere else in the world visiting icecubeflower.com gets a "this website does not exist" error (or is possibly sent to a website owned by someone else than yourself).

Why? Because the US government cannot decide what a Chinese internet service provider should associate icecubeflower.com with. So, a Chinese ISP could freely decide that, for its customers, icecubeflower.com is a porn site, or a warez site, or anything but your own website, and there is nothing you can do about it.

So, if domain attribution was done by the US government, you would only own your domain in the US. This is hardly interesting if you were intending to get visitors from outside the US, because those visitors won't be able to access your site using the domain you registered.