Domain Registration
An own homepage is essential for a founder, it is the business card and usually the first point of contact for customers. The name of the website is the domain. It consists of two parts, the name before the dot and the ending after the dot.
Second Level Domain
The part before the dot is the actual name of the page, the second level domain. The name is subject to various formal criteria such as a maximum number of characters etc. Care should be taken to ensure that the name does not violate the rights of others and contains, for example, names of existing persons, companies, trademarks, etc.
Top Level Domain TDL
The ending of the domain, i.e. the part after the dot. is the so-called Top Level Domain (TDL). This ending can be a country code Top-Level Domain (ccTLD), for example “.de” for Germany. There are also country independent extensions (generic Top Level Domain – gTLD). These include for example “.com”, “.net”, “.org”, “.info”.
ICANN + DENIC
Top Level Domains are assigned and managed by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). To check whether a particular address is available, a Whois (“Who is”) query can be made to ICANN (www.icann.org). The assignment of German domains is carried out by DENIC eG. For data protection reasons, DENIC eG only provides information about the owners of “.de” domains. In the case of legal entities, no persons should be registered as owners, but the company. The registration itself is handled by a provider who also offers other website services.
Date of Registration
The own domain should preferably be registered in public registers already before the application. So-called “grabbers”, for example, search for new registrations in the commercial register. They then set up a domain with this name with the aim of selling this domain to the respective founders.