Hi my name is Daniel Walter Scott and I'm a trainer here at Bring Your Own Laptop.

In this video we're going to look at how to choose a domain registrar, now the registrar is somebody who you actually give your money to, to purchase your domain name through.

Now my advice is to spend a little bit of time doing this because you're stuck with them for quite a long time, often you get your hosting with them as well and it can be a bit of a hassle changing from one company to the other, so spending a little bit of time through online reviews or talking to people who are in the industry like me to kind of get advice about who to pick can save a lot of time

The most popular domain registrar by far is Godaddy, you can see here, Godaddyoutranks the rest of them by quite a bit, there's another one called eNom, Network Solutions, Tucows and plenty more.

Now popular does not mean the best, I've been in classes where the word Godaddyhas come up and somebody in the class said "Yes! I love them, had such a great time, I'd recommend them to anybody" and the person right next to them has said "I hate them, I took my business somewhere else, I would never recommend them". So individual reviews can be not representative of the whole company. The best thing to do is if you don't have somebody to talk to, a professional who's worked in the industry and has dealt with the same domain name registrar for quite a long time, then is to try things like 'Top 10 forums' and those types of things. Try typing into google something like 'Top 10 hosting companies' in your country - I've used the UK here, dodge the ads and there is a lot to pick form in terms of review sites so the one I like the most is this one here, toptenreviews.com. I like this one, seems to be valid reviews, but also the layout of this website is quite nice, you can see it's got the top 10 here, but if I scroll down a bit can you see the little list follows down and it really helps you kind of find who has what features. So if you have got some really specific features to look out for you can slide down here and just make sure that the domain name you're going to pick has the right features.

The one that I'm looking for probably the most, especially if you're new is to scroll down until you find help and support and just make sure the 24/7 phone support, that's probably the most important when you're brand new is to be able to actually phone somebody, have a conversation with them and get some help.

Now in terms of domain name registrars that I'd recommend that I've had experience with, for the US I do like GoDaddy, they're a great registrar. For the UK I've used iPage a couple of times and they work well. For the Australian websites this company here called Digital Pacific they've been my favourite, I've tried a few in Australia and I've ended up changing to these guys who've been quite helpful. In Ireland I really liked the help with BlackNight, they helped me quite a bit with getting my domain name. In New Zealand I've used Freeparking for quite a long time.

Now if you've had any bad experiences or great experiences with domain names, please leave them in the comments. If you've problems with some of the ones I've recommended totally drop in your situation and lets share our combined experience together.