As promised, here’s a guide to getting started with your own .za.net/.za.org domain. This guide assumes you already have hosting setup and are going to be using the domain to point to your hosting server.

Step 1
The first step in any kind of domain registration is of course the domain name itself. You need to chose something that is fairly unique, identifiable and can not be read out of context (expertsexchange.com, penisland.net etc.). The domain name is usually the same as the name of the site you are using, but like ours, it doesn’t have to be. For the purpose of this tutorial, we will be using raventutorial.za.net.

Step 2
Get yourself some DNS hosting. For this tutorial we are going to be using a free service from Every DNS. You can read more about DNS servers over at Wikipedia, but essentially DNS gives an easy to remember name for an otherwise hard to remember IP address. For example, you tell your friends to meet you at Sandton City rather than 5th Street, Sandton Central, Sandown, Gauteng, South Africa.

Once you have created an account and logged in, add the domain using the input box to the left of the page, you can ignore the advanced settings for now.

Enter the domain name you want to register

Step 3
Click on the domain you have just added in the upper left corner. This is where you are going to be configuring your hosting server. By default your domain has a CNAME and Type A record, you need to delete these 2 entries.

Delete these entries

Add a Type A record with the IP address of your server as the value, then add a CNAME record with the same value as your domain – for us the CNAME would be raventutorials.za.net. This is what ours looks like when completed:

Add your server IP as an Type A record and domain as a CNAME record

Step 4
Once you have chosen a domain name and finished with the DNS settings, you can head on over to the ZA NiC Registration form and fill that bad boy out. It may look intimidating, but it’s fairly straight forward and you shouldn’t have a hard time completing it. The nameservers are the ones listed by Every DNS (ns1.everydns.net, ns2.everydns.net, ns3.everydns.net, and ns4.everydns.net)

Complete the ZA NiC registration form

Once completed you should get a confirmation message and an email detailing the results of your registration.

And that’s it, you should have your free domain in a couple of days depending on the load of domains to process over at ZA NiC. You can also view the status of your registration to see how far along in the queue it is.

Popularity: 21% [?]