A domain name gives you your own Internet identity. You’ll notice that the Web sites and e-mail addresses for companies on the Internet contain their name. For instance, IBM owns “ibm.com”, and LMi.net owns “lmi.net”. When you write to a person at IBM, their e-mail address will likely be something like “person@ibm.com”. When you want to reach the LMi.net Web site, you type in “www.lmi.net” in your Web browser.

But domain names are not limited to companies. Anyone can have a domain name. It can be personal, like “elizabeth-fitzgerald.com”, or it can be for business, like “toyota.com”. If you have a non-commercial organization, you might want to consider “yourorganization.org”. If the “.com” version of a domain name you want is already taken, try “yourchoice.net”.

A custom domain name is a domain name that is managed for you or your company by LMi.net. This means that LMi.net processes the registration of your domain name and hosts it on our servers. That way you can use our servers for your Internet access, but your Internet identity is your own domain name instead of our domain name (lmi.net). This means that you can receive mail at you@your-domain as opposed to you@lmi.net, and you can have a Web page called http://www.your-domain instead of http://users.lmi.net/your-login.

Choose a term that best describes your organization, usually the company name. If that is taken by someone else, you can create a variation of it by using a hyphen or an abbreviation of the name instead.

The only valid characters for a domain name are letters, numbers and a hyphen “-“. Other special characters like the underscore “_” or an exclamation mark “!” are NOT permitted. A domain name can be up to 64 characters long — including the 4 characters used to identify the Top Level Domain (.NET, .COM, .ORG, .EDU or .GOV).

NOTE: “http://www.example.com” is a uniform resource locator (URL) used by WWW browsers to find documents and resources on the WWW. It IS NOT a domain name (though a domain name is necessarily part of a URL).

You’ll need to sign an Internet Service Agreement form requesting the domain name and submit it to us via fax, mail or e-mail (we can get the form out to you in any of those formats as well). Then we process the request with our domain registrar partner. When they have finished processing it (usually takes 24-72 hours) they notify us and we in turn notify you. Then you can use (your-login)@(your-domain-name) instead of (your-login)@lmi.net for your e-mail address.

However, if you plan on using this domain name for a Web page (http://www.your-domain-name) and you do not already have Web account with us you’ll need to upgrade to a Web account.