In my quest to increase my presence on the internet, I thought I'd add colinseymour.co.za to my collection of domain names. I did a bit of searching for various ISP's within South Africa that would offer a nice cheap registration and forwarding service. I don't need hosting as I host my own sites, I just needed someone to do the web and mail forwarding for the domain.

After several hours of searching, things weren't looking good, the idea of having your own domain name appears to only be picking up in South Africa now, so things aren't that cheap. The cheapest I could find was a company offering just what I wanted, but they wanted R200 to register and set it up and then R100 each year to renew it. This seemed a little steep, even if I am paying in Pounds, so I thought I'd check out registering it directly with the naming authority - Uniforum Association.

Well, I was a little surprised to say the least... in the UK, registering directly with Nominet (the naming authority in charge of .co.uk domains) is way way more expensive than getting it through an ISP. However, in South Africa, this is completely the opposite. Ordering the domain directly from Uniforum costs only R50 to register and then it's R50 to renew it each year. Bonza!!!

Just one catch - you need to have your own DNS servers and they need to be resolving the domain name BEFORE you can register the domain name. This is because Uniforum don't provide any hosting or DNS services. Well, a quick trawl on the net revealed ZoneEdit. These guys will do the DNS, web forwarding and email forwarding for 5 domains for FREE!!!

So, a couple of mins later I was registered with these guys, with the colinseymour.co.za domain soon to be directing to this site.

Registering with Uniforum is easy peasy too. Just download the registration form, fill it in and email it back to them. The automatic checker thingy-ma-bob checks the form to make sure it's all A-OK and then emails you back to let you know. Once I'd got everything correct, I just had to go to the payment page and hand over my money.

That's it. In about 8 hours time, people visiting https://www.colinseymour.co.za should automatically be directed to this site.

I will soon be back at the top of all Colin Seymour's on Google, MSN and Yahoo.

Update: As of 1 November 2005 - you no longer have to pay the registration fee, so now it's even cheaper to register a .co.za domain.