Prerequistes: Accounts with Dynadot.com and Afraid.org

Setup an account with dynadot.com
Purchase the domain that you have been dreaming of or the domain that you will settle for.

Log into dynadot and open up the domain settings.  Go to the Name Server Settings for the domain that you wish to change.
For Name server 1 and 2 enter: ns1.afraid.org, ns2.afraid.org respectively.  Click Enter Name Servers, this will then show up just below where you enter them.

Create an account with afraid.org.  Log in by clicking on domain and entering user name and password.
Click on Add A Domain.
Enter domain name, “yourdomain.xxx”
For Shared State: select Private.
Click Submit.  As the website says you now need to wait for the NS (name server) to be updated.

Click sub domains, and that’s where you can add sub domains and root domain.
A record is pointing just at an IP Address
CNAME record points to another domain.

Click on the domain name “yourdomain.xxx”, enter destination as your IP Address (or where you want the domain to point).
You can also use Dynamic DNS to update you IP Address if you don’t have static IP Address.

If your domain is marked as broken, you can clear it if you click domain, and click check for broken domains.  It’ll still work regardless and it’ll get checked over the night.

To update your Dynamic DNS:
Under dynamic dns, it’ll give you the url to access and update the IP Address
This can be automated on a Linux box with Crontab

Example:          crontab -e

add */5 * * * * wget -O /dev/null “url”

Remember that each Linux Distro is slightly different
There are other ways (read better ways) to do the update DNS.  This is just a basic crontab to get the job done.
DNS updates can take up to a day to replicate across servers.