Host domains?

Question

How can i host domain names at home so i can have unlimited domains? i know how to to host websites at home. I want to have domains names instead of regitering with yahoo etc.

Answer 1

Interestingly, the answer is you can, but you probably aren't going to want to.

In order to be the authority for issuing domain names, you have to be a accredited domain name registrar. Accreditation is done by ICANN. http://icann.org/

The procedure for becoming an accredited domain name registrar is outlined here. http://www.icann.org/registrars/accredit... It's not cheap, and you must demonstrate your ability to maintain your registry and follow the policies of ICANN. For one thing, your registry must be searchable by other registries in order to avoid name collisions. (e.g., two individuals registering hitchhikers-intergalactic-magazine.com at the same time). If you did all that, you would be able to create something-really-cool.com, something-not-so-cool.com, etc.

What you can do much cheaper and easier is to get your own subdomain (like something-really-cool.com), register it with an accredited registrar, and then create sub-subdomains (my term) from that. You could have:

www.something-really-cool.com

abc.something-really-cool.com

def.something-really-cool.com

sales.something-really-cool.com

and so on.

For that, you only need to use the registrar's domain name services or host your own domain name servers (DNSs). The registrar then points anything ending in .something-really-cool.com to your DNS (or theirs if you rent DNS service from them). By ICANN "law," you need to have at least a pair of DNS servers registered for your subdomain (in case one of the two should fail).

Just to add another wrinkle, the DNS servers must be at static (fixed) IP addresses, so most residential Internet accounts don't qualify (as they use dynamic IP addressing. Your DNS servers are located by higher-level DNS servers using a well-known, routable, static IP address. Since they are going to defer requests for anything ending in something-really-cool.com to you, they need to know exactly where to find you by IP address, not by name. Therefore, the IP address cannot be changing every time you reboot or at the whim of your ISP. You could get a business account (or a static IP residential account) at your home. It may be simpler just to use a registrar's (aka domain name hosting) services.

Theoretically ,

www.something-really-cool.com

abc.something-really-cool.com

def.something-really-cool.com

sales.something-really-cool.com

would each be a different machine with its own static IP address (or a dynamic IP address that registers with the staticly-address DNS server, but that's way past where I want to go). In practice, they could all point to the same machine - even the same machine hosting the DNS server. There are configurations that can be used (with web servers like Apache for example) that allow each of those to be handled separately.