To our hosts and registrars, may they never meet

January 21st, 2008 by Chris

This post, I’m sure, will have many of you saying “Duh!” and rightfully so, most of you, I hope, know this, or realize it is common sense, but many people out there don’t and they get misled, confused, and screwed because of it.

I speak of course, of bundled services where your registrar is your host or your host is your registrar. For beginners this can be very attractive, one less thing to worry about, don’t have to learn about the NS stuff, you just tell your host what domain you want and they set it all up for you.

The problem is that, in most such circumstances, the legal owner of the domain ends up being the host, not you, and so if you ever want to move hosts (and everyone moves hosts eventually) you will not be able to, or you’ll have a hard time doing it.

This recently came up in the forums and the poster said he had 5 months of site downtime thanks to his host not releasing his domain. Unfortunately his experience is rather common, I hear about similar things once a month or so, and so, I felt this issue needed a big underline drawn beneath it (hence, this blog post).

Downtime is expensive, not only are you losing the direct income from the lost traffic, but indirectly you’re also hurting your long term promotional and SEO goals by being offline. The risk of downtime is far more expensive than the slight added cost of choosing not to take up your host or registrar on that bundled offer.

Your host is for your web space, and that is it, I would not use them for anything else. Your registrar is for your domain, and that is it, I would not use them for anything else. Even bundled design services, they may say that you cannot transfer your site off if you used them to get a design done.

No, keep everything separate.

Posted in: Website Management » by: Chris

One Response to “To our hosts and registrars, may they never meet”

Dan Schulz Says:
January 21st, 2008 at 11:35 am
Chris, this is exactly the reason why I suggest people bookmark and READ http://www.domainwarning.com VERY CAREFULLY. I cannot stress that enough.