trict credit policies require us to confirm the renewal in advance for a further 12 month period. All domain names that include .za is managed by UniForum (Domain Authoritiy). An annual renewal fee applies should you want to keep your domain name. The fee is charged annually on 1 December.

How does a domain work?

A: There are several conditions that are required for the domain name to be properly registered and accessible from the Internet:

»  The domain name has to be assigned to an IP address;

»  The domain name has to be registered with the Name Servers that "know" what IP address this domain name resolves to;

»  The domain name has to be registered with the appropriate Network Information Center (NIC) or Domain Authoritiy that keeps the database record of the domain ownership and the Name Servers that maintain the domain's IP record.

If the requested IP address is not registered locally, and you are the first person to request information about this system in a certain period of time (ranging from 12 hours to one week), then the local name server will perform a search on behalf of your workstation. This search may involve querying two or more other name servers at potentially very remote locations. These queries can take anywhere from a second or two up to a minute (depending on how well connected you are to the remote network and how many intermediate name servers must be contacted).

Sometimes, due to the lightweight protocol used for DNS, you may not receive a response. In these cases, your workstation or client software may continue to repeat the query until a response is received, or you may receive an error message. When you use an application such as telnet to connect to another computer, you most likely type in the domain name rather than the IP address of that computer. The telnet application takes the domain name and uses one of the above methods to retrieve its corresponding IP address from the name server. A good analogy is to think of DNS as an electronic telephone book for a computer network. If you know the name of the computer in question, the name server will look up its IP address.