Note that there is a charge for registering and holding a domain. You can pay the charge yourself or through your Internet Service Provider. You should decide how you are going to pay before you register the domain. We have not dealt with registration and payment in our examples.

The domain registration (including eventual payment) must be done before the TLD hostmaster makes a particular delegation. There are more than 250 TLDs and each of them probably has slightly different registration rules.

In Chapter 8, you will learn that the TLD register is held by IANA. If you want to know who the administrator of a particular domain is and find contact information, visit http://whois.iana.org. This website contains the following form with which you can search for a TLD by name.

Figure 6.2: First step when looking for a registration contact for a domain

For example, for the ru domain you will see:

[whois.iana.org]
IANA Whois Service
Domain: ru
ID: ru
Sponsoring Organization...