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Let’s talk about domain names. As the phrase implies, the name of your domain is like the address of your house. The address tells the Internet where to look to find your web site. Not all domain names lead to web sites. Most are vacant lots.

VISIT the Dotster web site

Of the millions of domain names licensed with the U. S. Department of Commerce, only a small portion lead to actual web sites. People who don’t own their own sites, seem to find this fact incredibly confusing. Not long ago a man wrote to me very upset saying he had purchased a web site, but could not get it to work. How much had he paid the web developer to build the site? – I asked him. Just $35, he said. I checked and, as expected, he had registered a domain name, but had not designed and built a site or hosted it on any server.

After you get the address, you still have to build the house. If you think of the house as your web site and the hosting fee as a sort of tax for owning the land, you get the general picture of the steps required in web site ownership. Unless you host and build the site yourself, there are at least three organizations to deal with. Only when all three are paid (domain, developer, host) and their work in alignment can someone enter your "house" online and look around.

You pay an annual fee to license a domain name. I know. I have 40 of them. Mine are mostly dot-com names, but I have a couple of dot-orgs and one dot-biz. There are dot-govs, dot-names, and more new registration formats on the way. The latest craze is for dot-cn domains. The CN stands for China where there are 59 million registered Internet users.

When the Web first got rolling the government authorized a company called Networtk Solutions to register all domains. Life was simpler then with only one place to register, but as the Web expanded, more companies were licensed to register sites. Due to competition, domain registration rates dropped quickly. Today most go for around $15, a fee that you have to pay every year to keep your domain name license alive. Forget to register, and you are doomed. I’ve seen it happen too many times.

You can tell if someone owns a domain name by checking with INTERNIC (www.internic.net). That’s a service mark authorized by ICANN. That acronym stands for Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

ICANN (www.icann.org) is the nonprofit agency created to take responsibility for setting up and maintaining all these millions of addresses on the Web. Anyone can click the WHOIS button on Internic to learn "who owns a particular domain name. I prefer to check with www.WhoIs.net , which is a commercial site, but offers the same data with more detail.

For example, I own the domain name SeacoastMoney.com. Don’t ask me why, I just do. There is no web site yet. I only own the address. You can go to WHOIS.net, type in that domain name and learn all about me – my name, my mailing and email addresses, my phone number and the expiration date of my domain name. All that data is public. You can check on any domain name registered, more than 33 million at the moment. It’s a great way to kill an afternoon.

When ICANN authorized companies other than Network Solutions to register domain names, there was a feeding frenzy. The effect was similar to the deregulation of the phone company. Those of us holding a number of domains (some people own hundreds, even thousands) were looking for the best price. I agonized over where to move by precious domains and settled on Dotster.com, a company out of Vancouver, Washington. The move saved me about $600 a year in domain fees.

Verio.com, the people who host my web site, now offer domain registtarion for $9.95 a year. Others like Web.com, have slashed the rate to $6.95 and for that price you can get free web hosting of a single page for an entire year. Everybody seems to be in the registration business now.

For the moment I’m sticking with Dotster. So far, this company has been good to me. It’s not easy keeping track of 40 domains, but the Dotster software allows me to manage them online easily. When a domain is up for renewal, I get an email warning me well in advance. If I elect to renew automatically, then Dotster charges my credit card $14.95 and rolls over the domain name for another year. If I want to dump a name (I just dumped CeliaThaxter.org, for example), I get many chances to change my mind before the domain slips back into the pool of available addresses.

I especially like the URL forwarding feature. It works like call forwarding on your phone. I can bounce one domain to any page on the Internet for just $5 a year. There is no KitteryMaine.com, for instance. I own that domain, but have never built the site. Type that address into your Web browser and Dotster bounces you over to one of my operating web sites. We’ve come a long way in a few short years. The consumer has a lot of power and control and prices have fallen amazingly. But we take a lot of risks assigning critical tasks to anonymous low-rent companies.

Dotster has a plethora of other services I don’t use. Like most domain registrars, they now also host web sites. They offer software that allows an amateur to build a web site online, then register with search engines, get email, and tap into an array of online marketing tools.

It’s really hard to know who to trust in cyberspace. Using the WhoIs listing, scammers frequently send me written and digital bills for my domain names. It happens all the time. I never pay them and my domain names keep working, but these mock invoices can be nerve-racking. I get phone calls from people offering services for web sites I’ve never built. Being a scammer has to be a thankless job. I’d need two showers after a day of such cold-calling.

Dotster has been good to me so far. As a Yankee, once I find a vendor I trust, I stick there until forced to move on. To maintain my 40 domains, I type a pair of codes into the Dotster homepage. From there, without the help of a web developer, I can search for and add new domain names, pay my annual fees, check due dates, bounce addresses, and much more. The software "robot" almost always does what I tell it to do.

But humans being humans, are sometimes in need of a heart. Two years ago Dotster users began complaining that the company had taken its phone number off the web site. There were complaints that the initially friendly owners were becoming harder to reach. People who were unhappy complained in user groups online and some of those comments are still floating in cyber space. Members of the site Epinions.com registered high ratings for Dotster when it opened, but the latest posting I read was negative. Users who complain have been unable to get satisfaction from humans, they say.

But what the heck do you expect for $15 a year? I pay $200 a month to host just one of my web sites and when I call the toll free number at 3 a.m. on a Sunday, someone answers. For $14.95, all I expect is a good robot. When I emailed the Dotster public relations page two days ago requesting an interview with someone, I got no response, even though I’m also a customer. Dotster made the news recently when a porn site was registered there, but the Internet is awash with porno sites and the owners are insidiously skilled at staying undercover. When a mock PayPal site tried to steal customers from the original company, the scammer was reportedly traced to Dotser. Bad karma. But what parents can be responsible for a million children?

So I’m sticking, for now, trusting my domains to people I’ve never met. You can test Dotser at your own risk. Other sites include Register.com, CheapDomainRegistration.com, DomainDirect.com, Dynonames.com, MonsterDomainRegistration.com, Discount-Domain.com. The list goes on and on. Choice is a scary thing.