Quick tip: When you get ready to start your own website, Google the domain name you're thinking about registering. I checked to make sure no one else had registered mine, of course, because each domain name is unique. But I forgot to Google it.
It turns out a wonderful, international society in my own field -- a society I've heard of for years -- has a periodical journal with the same name as my blog.
ARGH.
I have contacted them to try and work something out, the way Apple Computer worked out a deal with the Apple record company. But in the end, if they don't want me using it, I'm going to change my blog domain, which snaps all the links to it that I spent a month building.
Learn from my mistake.
Incidentally, there are many web hosts and services that will register your domain name cheaply -- my ICDSoft charged me $5 -- so search around the web to find a "register your domain name" service that's cheap. A lot of people use GoDaddy, but Google GoDaddy to read positive and negative reviews. I just Googled ICDSoft again to check and see it's still well-rated and liked by its customers.
The reason ICDSoft is cheap is because it's packaged as one part of their web hosting service. That is, you don't just register a domain name with them; you also have your website hosted on their servers, which means paying them as a webhost as well. But quite frankly, I think it makes more sense to find a good web host and have them register your domain name cheaply, than have your website hosted with one company and have another register the domain.
That said, at the bottom of this intel, I've linked to two web pages reviewing various domain name registration providers, to help you decide which service is best for you.
