You “purchase” a URL by registering it with a Domain Registrar.
This is any one of thousands of companies which are licensed directly or indirectly by ICANN – the International organization that runs the Internet naming system.
Registration fees are typically paid yearly and often run in the $10 to $15 a year range.
Whoever has registered a URL, controls it. So never let someone else register a domain name for you.
We recommend using a company that is directly licensed by ICANN. We use 000Domains because it is inexpensive, their control panel is easy to navigate, and they provide all the services someone might need from a domain registrar.
One thing you can typically do with a domain registrar is to find out if a URL is available or not. Just typing in the address won’t do, as someone might own the address but not have a website up for it.
The core service provided by your domain registrar is to tell the whole Internet WHERE your website is located. A website has to be hosted – meaning somewhere it is on a special kind of computer called a hosting server, which connects to the Internet. It is your domain registrar which sends out the information world-wide as to where that is. But you have to tell it, which you can normally do from a control panel by changing the “name servers.”
The other services your domain registrar should offer are Domain (URL) forwarding – if someone types in one website address, it brings up the second URL; and Email forwarding – same, but for email addresses.
Registering a URL
