Registering a domain name for yourself or your practice is the only truly time critical step. Establishing an online presence is a daunting project, but it is an essential component of building a modern practice. You can proceed stepwise at your own pace, but the sooner you build an effective two-way web site including such modern efficiencies as Online Scheduling, the happier your pilots will be, and the fuller your schedule will be. If
you chose to do nothing at this point, you will still be represented in a simple, professional manner with a "default" FlightPhysical.com site echoing the
public information in the FAA AME directory. The only potentially time-critical action for AMEs is the optional
registration of your own "domain," before someone else claims it. A domain is a personal Internet address ie.
www.yourname.com. Tell me more about domains.
Many AMEs are registering and using their own domains, if you are curious, you should check now to see if a web address that you want is still available and claim
it as soon as possible. This is definitely time-critical because domains are registered by an international authority
(ICANN) and they are being claimed at about 30,000 per day! If you don't get the domain you want soon, it will
probably be claimed by someone else in the US or internationally.
Short, simple dot-com domain names are the
best, but most are already claimed. If you have a common name, it is probably already registered, but you could still get a
variation. For example, if www.smith.com is taken, and you really want your own domain, try www.doctorsmith.com, or
www.stevesmith.com. You can also search for publicly offered domains ending in ".org", ".net", ".us" and the newer domains such as ".aero", ".name" and ".info" and other suffixes.
If you want to check to see what's available, go to our services page. Domain
registration is a competitive business and prices vary from $15 a year to the standard $35 a year depending on who sells it
to you and what added features you get. Regardless of which registrar sells you the domain, once you register your
domain name, you own it and no one else can get it (unless you forget to renew). If new to the process it is best to let FlightPhysical.com register the name to allow us to help advise you in choices of different hosting options, insure privacy, and maximize cost-effectiveness. We buy names in bulk and offer domain names for $15 per year. This allows us to "point" your domain to your existing flightphysical.com page, so you don't have to "park"it. You can purchase a domain name (www.yourpractice.com) from hundreds of competing registrars, but many are over-priced, and more importantly many registrars maintain very inflexible policies which severely limit your future pointing and hosting options (24 hour publishing of your web pages). You can register with anyone, but if you've not yet purchased your domain name, you should consider allowing FlightPhysical.com to register on your behalf. This service is offered to current AMEs only, and our name will appear as a Proxy owner. You still control the domain and have full benefits of ownership. Even with us registering for you, you can:
- Cancel, sell, renew or transfer your domain.
- Modify the domain name servers for your domain.
- Resolve desputes involving your domain.
The benefit of a FlightPhysical.com registration is that the Whois database will publish our name, addresses and phone numbers instead of your personal identifying information. That way, you are protected from spammers, phishers, ID harvesters, scammers and other intruders. Allowing the AMEs and Internet professionals at FlightPhysical.com to manage your registration is free and this allows you to concentrate on other portions of your practice, thereby reducing your headaches during all phases of development. We help you each step of the way, and you have numerous hosting options with FlightPhysical.com, and we support hosting with your own company. We maintain flexible "pay-as-you-grow" policies. Our services are guaranteed and there are no long term contracts for AMEs. Click here for a review about the differences between hosting and registering and other nonintuitive parts of building a web presence.
It is important to note that there
are really five independent costs associated with owning a domain:
Internet Publicity is FlightPhysical'com's strongest contribution to your practice, and Online Scheduling is the best practice enhancement your can make. Online scheduling is available to your regardless of where you host your site, but FlightPhysical.com can
professionally host a full private domain for you for $15 a month (unlimited bandwidth), we will host it "virtually" for $6
per month, or you can have a domain or web pages hosted elsewhere with a link from us ($2 per month). Our terms and service are the best in the industry. Linking from us
gives you the benefit of our broad Internet presence and top search engine postition to attract pilots to your site.
Some of the services offered by flightphysical.com will be available to you whether you own your personal domain or
not. You can maintain a small text and graphics template page on our site for free. Free sites are dynamic database-driven HTML
pages with up to two pictures and text. See our pricing page for various
free and commercial web site options.
We get
3000-4000 daily hits of "web traffic" through our umbrella site and we maintain thousands of direct inbound links from
aviation sites and Internet search engines. Our collective strength attracts much greater pilot attention than any
single AME site could. As of Jan 2007 our site was ranked number one out of 38,200,000 returned pages on query terms "flight" and "physical". You can have your site hosted for free at certain companies, but as you know, there are no true "free lunches," so if you go the free route,
you must tolerate other peoples advertisements on your pages. This is probably not a good idea for your practice's home
page, but it maybe reasonable for a personal domain. If you like we will do the as much of the process for you as
desired.
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