All about internet
Check out the newly redesigned Reality Hosting Homepage! Each page was customized to feature specific content and graphics in key areas of the layout. The result is a well balanced design that gets the information across to the viewer easily and effectively.
Why yoursite.com? If you care about things you publish on the Internet and respect your readers, these two steps are absolutely necessary:
Yes, that means you are paying a regular fee from now on, but this is the only way to be independent and have full control over your site.
No, there is no way around it. The most common pitfall is domain redirection schemes: you host your site wherever you can (usually for free), register your own domain name and pay a small fee to a company that makes your site appear to have your domain name. Unfortunately, no redirection technology works exactly the way a normal hosting does. At best, it will lead to unpleasant surprises and technical problems to some of your visitors and your site will never be indexed correctly by the Internet search engines (that alone is enough to not use redirection). 
No, there is no free lunch. These services intrinsically cost money. There is a company that offers second-level domain names for free, supported with massive advertising, but make no mistake - they own it, not you, and it’s indeed they who dictate the rules. Why waste time. Pay a moderate amount and get the real thing. It’s more than affordable today (domain name and decent hosting costs $100-150/year; if you get into temporary financial straits later in your life, you can always switch to free hosting with redirection while keeping your domain name, $15-25/year). Have respect for your readers and for yourself. Enough said.
Sadly, by the time one realizes all this, usually he or she already has pages published on URLs that somebody else controls. To handle it with the least loss, you need to replace every HTML page at your old URL with a custom redirection page pointing at exactly the same page on your new permanent site (not just to the site main page). Make sure these redirection pages at the old location live as long as possible (one year at the very least, several years better).
Feel free to take my example of redirection page as a template. Note that you need to edit URL in three places in the page source to replace each of your pages. It didn’t take me long to replace a hundred pages on my site by hand; if you know Perl, you can write a script and publish it here. I also replaced every image file on my old site with a small image-notice (JPEG or GIF) in case somebody linked to images directly or used them on their pages. Still, you’re creating small inconveniences to a lot of people (including yourself) and you’d better set your site up the right way as soon as possible.
By now I’ve dealt with six hosts (four of them commercial) and four registrars, so it’s time to sum up this little experience. 
Every top-level domain (TLD) authority has a list of accredited registrars, i.e. companies that can register and maintain domain name for you. The authority for .com, .org and .net TLD is ICANN, but InterNIC site provides a better organized list of registrars. For other TLDs, such as two-letter country code ones, look for the corresponding local authority. For instance, for .no - Norway - it is NORID with its own list of registrars for .no domain and registration rules, which are rather restrictive comparing to “anyone can” policy for .com, .org and .net.
Looking for a good domain name may take time. Most common words and short domain names have already been taken.
Web site hosting is a different service. Firms offering it are in abundance (just look around) and it is very competitive, because it takes little effort to move your site elsewhere in the world. Look for “own domain name” option in the hosting plans. Let me name one directory where you can search through many providers and plans: HostSearch.
