Domain name Registration and Hosting

What is a domain name?

A domain name represents an online resource on the Internet.

Businesses typically register domain names containing their company name or product and brand names. Individuals can also register family names or names that have a personal interest to them.

Domain names consists of a prefix, and a suffix. The prefix is typically the company name or product name. The suffix is the domain type. Examples of domain names are isat.co.za, orionsoftware.com and google.com.

Each domain name is unique on the Internet, and has to be registered at a domain authority before it becomes active. iSAT does the registration on your behalf, and also makes sure that renewal fees are paid to the registrar on time.

The domain types listed below, are some of the more popular ones. There are many others, please log a ticket on our Help Desk System if you want to register a different type of domain.

Domain Registration (VAT inclusive)

The domain type part of the domain name, is meant to indicate something about the entity using it. For example, amazon.co.uk implies that this branch of Amazon is the one operating from the United Kingdom. acmesales.co.za implies that this business operates in South Africa.

Because of the general shortage of meaningful domain names, the .web.za domain name has been introduced, it has the same purpose as the .co.za domains, which is to infer that the domain belongs to a South African based business.

.com domains are a little different, because they were one of the first domain types to be created. A .com domain name normally means that the business using that name is based in the United States, or that the business is operating internationally, or possibly intends doing so in the future.

.org and .org.za domains were originally intended for use for non-profit organisations, but this is not always the case nowadays.

.net and .net.za were originally intended for those involved in networking technologies such as Internet service providers, and supporting infrastructure companies.

.mobi domains are used for Web sites designed to be viewed via a browser on a mobile device.

At the time of registration, we also set up DNS (domain name server) entries for your domain. The DNS records contain details of the services linked to the domain. When data in the DNS records are changed, it takes time for other DNS servers to get that updated data, the delay is known as propagation time. During propagation time services for the domain may or may not work on different networks. For this reason changes to DNS records must be done with extreme care, as trouble shooting any errors can be complex.

DNS record data typically include mail hosting and web hosting data.

The first domain, symbolics.com, was registered in 1985. Today there are over 271 million registered domain names.