Before you decide on getting your business online you have to first make sure that the name of your company is available for domain name registration. If you are a business solely based in South Africa then it would be a good idea to register a .co.za domain name as that will immediately identify and portray you as a South African business. If you want a more international exposure it would be advisable to get a .com or .net domain name.

The best place to see if your .co.za domain name is available is to visit co.za/whois.shtml . Once there, you are able to type in your desired name and search to see if it is available or not. If it is not available it will show you the details of who owns that domain. If the domain is available it will let you know that you can go ahead and register that domain name.

With the ever increasing number of businesses going online in South Africa, chances are that all the ‘good’ .co.za names have already been registered so if you are starting up a company and thinking of a company name, it is a good idea to first check that the domain name for your desired company is available. It would not be great once you have gone ahead and registered your company that you find the domain name has been taken by someone else.

The process for registering a .co.za domain name directly with the co.za authorities is fairly simple and straight forward. The most important part is being able to provide name servers for your domain name. Simply put, name servers are the address where your domain name will be ‘hosted’ or directed to. It is like giving your domain name a street address. You need this ‘street address’ first before you can go ahead and register a .co.za domain name. If you have an existing web hosting provider they will be able to give you this ‘address’ for you or you can request for them to go ahead and do the domain name registration for you. What I have found with this option is that, most hosting providers will gladly register the domain name for you and host it on their servers / ‘address’ but will charge you anything between R100 and R250 for the domain name registration for one year when in actual fact it costs R50 if done directly with the .co.za authorities.

We at Rand Mediacom can assist you in registering your co.za domain name if it is available for the same cost of R50 that you would pay anyway doing it directly with the co.za authorities. We will provide you with the required ‘address’ to complete the registration. Once you have secured your domain name it is now up to you to decide what you want to do with it. Maybe you want to start using it for an email service or better yet you want to develop a website for your business. Whatever it is you want to do with the domain name after registration, Rand Mediacom will be able to assist you. Fell free to contact us to find out more about co.za domain name registration.