Now that I am switching to high-speed internet and will eventually ditch Speedfactory (where I have been since 2001), I wanted to move my web page to its own website. This meant I needed to buy a domain name. Jeb suggested I use my own name, but this is from someone named Cashel, so I didn’t think it was a good idea to use my actual name. A few months ago I went through and tested out whether different domains were available by going to networksolutions (this could have been a mistake, because recently it was revealed that when people search for domains there, networksolutions takes the name so that only they can sell it to you).
If I tried bridge-related names, then bridgeguy, boxgirder, and ibeam were not available (all with .com on the end; I don’t see any reason to get anything else). Other names like gobbledygook, spiderwort, and seriesoftubes were also not available. However, in addition to my name being available (not just last name which was taken years ago), dejumble, dejumbler, and my web username brted were all available. With bridge themes, igirder, georgiabridges, kipfeet, kipfoot, and igirder were available. “Kip” is short for kilo-pound, a unit that comes up a lot when designing bridges. And kip-foot is a unit for moment, torque, bending, or leverage meaning you have one kip pushing down one foot away. It’s a fun word.
In the end, I decided that igirder was the best name because not only does it describe beams used in bridges, but it has the iCachet of iPod, iMac, iTunes, etc. So last weekend I went ahead and bought igirder.com at namecheap which I had used before and where I already had an account with money in it. Last time I bought a domain with them it was $8.88 per year, but now it is $9.29. However namecheap often has coupons available and I was able to get 88 cents off and got the domain for $8.21.
The next step was to get a place to actually store the files. With GDOTEA I had used asmallorange, but since I get many more visitors than GDOTEA does (using the $25/year tiny orange plan), I would have to get a plan that would be at least $60 per year (small orange). That’s still a good deal, but there was a slight possibility that I would even go over that plan’s limit of 10 gigabytes per month and need to upgrade to the medium orange plan which is $10 per month, giving me 25 GB of traffic per month.
Jeb came to the rescue saying I could use his server. With asmallorange I changed the domain name server to the one at asmallorange instead of at namecheap and it worked fine. But Jeb’s server doesn’t have a name server, so instead I pointed namecheap to the IP address of Jeb’s server and he made some kind of entry that would tell traffic where on the server my files were saved. It took a while to get to that point, but I moved a copy of all my files over to the server and the site is up and running. One trend lately is to get rid of the www part of a web address and just use the domain. So that’s what I have done:
Thanks, Jeb!
I wound up renewing igirder at NameCheap this past fall, but GoDaddy has a deal where if you transfer a domain they will add a year to the current expiration. Since igirder didn’t expire until January 2010, once I finished the transfer it now goes to January 2011. The transfer process wasn’t terrible, but I messed up first by not unlocking the domain at NameCheap before trying a transfer (seems like NameCheap would let you know this when you ask for an EPP code). Then it took a day for NameCheap to ask me to authorize the transfer (this is in addition to providing the EPP code plus some other code that GoDaddy sent to me as the domain holder). After that last authorization, it went right through. Now I’m done with NameCheap and I have a separate account at GoDaddy for me and another one for the engineer’s association for their two domains.
I have only used GoDaddy and NetSolutions. I really like everything about GoDaddy except for the sexist (?) ads and the attempt to cross-sell you something with every step when you are buying something.