What's In A Name?

By JOSHUA QUITTNER

When I heard that Compaq recently paid one fellow an astonishing $3.3 million to buy the Internet domain name altavista.com I panicked. How much longer could I wait to register quittner.com True, my family name is not (yet) a primary destination on the Web. But neither was altavista.com when Jack Marshall, a San Jose, Calif., electrical engineer registered it in January 1994. Happily for Marshall, Digital Computer Corp. (later bought by Compaq) launched a popular search engine in 1995 called AltaVista. By this year, some 500,000 people a day were typing altavista.com into their browsers--and going directly to Marshall's website, which advertised his small software start-up. What they were looking for, of course, was the less obvious address altavista.digital.com

At around the time that Marshall was registering altavista.com I was snagging the domain name mcdonalds.com for a Wired Magazine story. I suspect that Marshall paid for altavista exactly what I paid: nothing. In those good old days, name registration was free. A $3.3 million profit is a pretty good return on your investment--though some readers might point out that it's in line with the kind of performance that Wall Street expects from Internet businesses.

In any event, since it was so easy and cheap to register domain names, a gold rush ensued, and people gobbled up everything from soup.com to nuts.com Domain-name speculators registered trademarked names hoping for a quick profit--precisely the point I tried to illustrate with mcdonalds.com Predictably, the lawyers arrived and created a new field: Internet law. One enterprising company, NetNames International, even specializes in "domain-name recovery" and claims to have a stable of 60 attorneys worldwide standing by to repossess ill-gotten names. Not wanting quittner.com to fall into the wrong hands, I decided to procure it myself last week.

So how do you register a domain name? It's actually pretty easy--though a raft of companies is happy to do it for you for setup fees ranging from $100 to $250. Do-it-yourselfers should visit Network Solutions, which administers domain-name registration in the U.S., at rs.internic.net Click on the words "Register a domain name" and fill out the form. The cost? A mere $70 for two years.

The only tricky part is you'll need an Internet-connected server to "host" your site. This is where many people, suffering a failure of nerve, will want to pay an Internet service provider to take over. One of the better website hosting deals I found was at best.com which for a $30 one-time fee and $24.95 a month, will register a site for you and administer it. (You get e-mail and Web access through your site too.)

If you want to save money and avoid dealing with a Web hosting service, however, one alternative is to get a friend to host your domain. Try at work. If your business is on the Net, ask your system administrator if you could list its servers as the hosts. Since this costs the hosting site nothing--it's strictly a routing and administrative function that allows people to find your site--it's worth a try. My friend Jeff Pulver, who has a T1 line that connects his home to the Internet at 1.5 million bits per second, agreed to host quittner.com And now it's mine. Of course, I'd be happy to sell it to you--consider it a steal at $1 million.

To learn more, go to time.com/personal You can e-mail Josh at jquit@well.com Watch him and Anita Hamilton on CNNfn's Digital Jam, at 7:30 p.m. E.T. on Wednesdays.