[wplug] domain question

[Zach Uram]

I wanted to get my own domain but I've never done it before. I guess I
go find a domain registrar and pay around $20 and the domain is mine
for a year. So once I have the domain how do I set it up so that if
someone goes to www.mydomain.org it will automatically redirect them
to http://my-public-ip and I want the URL bar to only show
"www.mydomain.org" and never the IP of my webserver. Will I have to
run my own DNS servers? Never did that either. Also what if my machine
goes down (I run low end SDSL, power outage or whatever reason), how
can I set up the domain so that if my IP is down it will automatically
send them somewhere else such as http://my-backup-ip but still show
"www.mydomain.org" ? Running Ubuntu. Later I would like to add mail
services but for now I'm just worried about setting up a domain for a
web presence.

Zach