There have been enough people who ask me how I got my domain, how much it costs, and how to do it, that I thought I may as well just document it here. That way when they ask, I can tell them to goto my website, and pretty soon, I will have an IPO, and there will be articles in the WSJ telling of the misfortune of Yahoo!, and how they are about to go out of bidness 'cause of the newest greatest portal site, jeffzimmerman.net...
Yeah, ok, well, maybe not, but still, making this page is something to keep me off the streets at the very least.

    First you will need to find a domain name that is available. Network Solutions is one place to find out. There you can enter a name, and it will tell you if it is available. You can choose to have your domain name end in .com, .net, or .org, so long as it is available. It costs $70 to register a name with Network Solutions, which used to be called internic. Internic was in charge of all domain name registration, but our government saw fit to break the monopoly, and you may be able to find other companies who you can register with, and you may even be able to find it cheaper too. This $70 covers two years of registration. Then it is $35 per year to keep a domain name. Keep in mind that once a domain name is registered, there is no way to make you give it up, nor can you make someone else give theirs up. Until you fail to pay the registration fee, of course.

    Ok, but read on, because there is a bit more to it. Once you have found a domain name that you want, and it is available, you will have to have a place to host your webpage. I host mine at Dreamhost. They strictly host web pages. They do not provide a dial-up connection! They are not an ISP! This costs $10 per month, and you get 10mb of space. You can get more space by paying in advance, or choosing a different service level, which costs more, but you get extra services too. There are any number of companies that provide webhosting services, just search for "webhosting" in your favorite search engine.

    You may have webspace provided by your ISP. If you do, you may be able to host your page with them. Inquire at your ISP's site regarding registering a domain name.

    It is easiest to register the domain name with whomever you choose to host your website. That way they will take care of all of the technical details, like nameserver IP addresses, and various other things. I would highly recommend this as the way to register your name, unless you know quite a bit about the internet, in which case you should not be reading a howto you should be writing one.

    Those are pretty much the two ingredients of having your own domain. Except you may need to learn how to create the pages. Unfortunately that is a bit beyond the scope of what I can cover here. There are various places you can learn how to do HTML, one of them being here where they have an online tutorial for creating your own HTML. Or you can use programs that will turn out HTML for you, like FrontPage98 by microshaft (err, soft), or HotDog. Check tucows for HTML editors.