When our site is renewed.

[Steve Scharf]

When our site is renewed we were thinking of changing the domain name. Does this cost extra?

We have unitedgamerscoalition.com and want to change it to something shorter and are willing to wait until the renewal to do so. Just want to know if it costs extra to do that. if not great, if so not so great.

[tkieffer]

Well... let's clarify a few things:

1. Domain names (such as unitedgamerscoalition.com) are currently administered by a company called VeriSign and their website is called netsol.com (Yes, there are exceptions... but almost all domain names we'd want to use in the USA are handled by VeriSign). When you purchase a domain name from anywhere other than netsol.com what is actually happening is that other company is going over to netsol.com and purchasing the domain you requested (No, they don't actuall manually do that... it's automated!).

2. Web hosts like hostrocket provide you a place to "put" the domain you have purchased from VeriSign. Many web hosts provide the capability of registering a domain name for you when you first sign up, but in the end they do not actually administer the domain name... VeriSign does.

3. Because your "web hosting" and your "domain name" are handled by two separate corporations you may find that when one expires, the other does not. For example: Domain names have to be purchased in year increments (costing $35 per year) and can be pre-paid for 1,2,3,5 or 10 years. Your web hosting on the other hand could be purchased on a month-by-month basis.

4. As far as I know you cannot "change" the name of a domain. You would simply have to purchase a brand new domain from scratch. If you were to purchase another domain name then I am sure that hostrocket would be willing to provide you the information you need in order to get it working with the "account" you already have with hostrocket. Why not send in a trouble ticket to hostrocket asking them, or head on over to netsol.com for yourself and see what's available.

[TomD]

Register a new domain name (ugc.com for example) with who ever you like and have HR park it at your current site. People could use the long, short or whatever and all would get to your site.