Getting a domain name today takes less than 10 minutes. In the early days getting a domain name was a painful process for companies as well as individuals. It was mainly companies buying domain names not individuals. Everyone was buying domain names were parking them to resell later. Because of this parking it became even harder to register a domain name. I had just formed a new incorporation after dissolving Nuff Respect. Network Solutions was the only company/organization that provided domain names. They requested so much paper work I was wondering if they wanted blood and my first born child. Back then you had to fax everything.
When there is so much paper work you can expect “hiccups” in the process. It took me almost 2-3 months to secure the name. In fact the website was actually online before I got the domain name. The next step was hosting the domain name (yourdomain.com) which is a little different from hosting a websites on someone else’s domain (theirdomain.com/yourwebsite). For the techies out there the forms we currently use for DNS is a God send. In the past you were communicating by phone and sometimes email with the technical team of the hosting company to get your domain name working.
In the midst of trying to get my domain name up the ISP/hosting company got sold. This was not unusual as ISP/hosting consolidation was the norm in the mid to late 1990’s. Companies kept merging.
The ISP consolidation was especially frustrating for regular internet surfers because of the technical changes you had to make on your home computer. Each time the ISP merged you had to reconfigure the software you used to access the internet, your mail program (I was using Eudora for email back then) and sometimes your dial-up modem.
The hosting company was now Hiway.net which eventually was bought by Verio which is still around today. I eventually had to move again because of bandwidth issues and pricing.
Eventually the domain name got online with the new hosting company and we were now “Jamaicans.com”.