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Domain Registration and Web Hosting Hints

Domain Registration Hints - and recommendations

Beware! Search for your domain name at a trusted site such as godaddy.com or networksolutions.com.  There are many disreputible sites that will hi-jack your searched name, registering it themselves, making it impossible for you to use it or use it inexpensively

We recommend that you do not register your domain name with your hosting company. 

The hosting company is usually a reseller (3rd party affiliate) for some other Domain Registrar.

Also, your registrar may be a reseller of hosting services.  If you DO choose to register with your host make sure your host is NOT a reseller.

You may not know which registrar is being used until it is time to make some changes. (recommendation: find out how much your domain name renewal will cost if you do choose a free first year from your hosting company).

If and when you change hosting companies, you will have to first get freed of the registration relationship with the host you are canceling. Also, you might decide not to keep your site up on the web - if you cancel your hosting you will need to know what will happen to your (registered by your host) domain name registration - having a hosting company independent of a registrar will eliminate this issue. In our case of leaving Purehost (see our hosting review page), and with the difficult time reaching customer service, it was a chore to get it done.  The initial free one year site registration was not worth the price. 

Our first domain hosting company / registrar, back in 1999, was Mindspring. We moved to Dellhost and had trouble moving our site.  Then, when Dell sold their hosting business to Purehost, we found that the actual registrar (wholesaler) was Network Solutions (NSI.com).  In order to eliminate our Purehost problem, Purehost first had to change our registration from a wholesale account (aka: third party) to a retail account at NSI.

Beware Free:
Free web site hosting and free domain name registrations always have qualifications or caveats.  Beware! You may not own your data and or domain name; you may have design limitations, performance qualifications, no privacy or you may have to have unwanted (and sometimes competing) advertising on your pages, you will get unwanted tracking of your site visitors or other such risks.  Free may lock you into one technical company or another (ie, Microsoft or Adobe for example); eliminating or complicating your ability to make changes when you need it, when you want to move to another platform. 

Reputable hosting can be found for under $3 a month and domains can be registed for under $10 a year.

Beware Privacy:
The web is forever.  Anything (and everything - emails, text and instant messages, images, videos, phone calls - everything) digitally produced on the web is copied, backed up, archived, shared, sent to others and so.  It is as public as a billboard seen on the highway.  Except: The Web is forever!  The information will be / can NEVER be deleted everywhere.  Free means you have less control.  With a paid hosting account, you have control over how our data is displayed and control over the totality your web site as a whole)

 Domain Registrar recommendations (a short review of Godaddy below (see our Godaddy Review page too) and a short Network Solutions Review):

Before you register your domain name and choose any domain name registrar or hosting company, confirm that they offer 24 / 7 telephone support.  Some registrars do not.  In fact, some registrars do not have telephone support at all.  Two of our clients used such a registrar and it took weeks to get changes made.

Network Solutions is a reliable registrar and has very good 24 / 7 technical support.   NSI is expensive however.  Network Solution's current one year name registration rate is about $35, with discounts for longer terms ($15 a year for each year of a 9 or 10 year registration).

Our favorite registrar is Godaddy.com.  The price for a one year .com site is $10 per year - sometimes less when sales are in effect - discounts are given for long term registrations.  Godaddy, too, offers very good 24 / 7 support. 

Like CrystalTech too, Godaddy is an American company with support by technicians in the USA, 24/7. (Calls to Network Solutions (NSI), off hours, are apparently serviced by off-shore support people with sometimes difficult to understand accents and limited English and language skills).

Our domain name registrar recommendation is Godaddy.com.

Godaddy expanded their facilities and employment in Arizona in April 2005   What else can we say?  This Godaddy Review recommends them as our registrar of choice.  Even though support calls to Godaddy are not toll free and hold times are a little longer than Network Solution's -  Godaddy is right. 

How many sites are registered at GoDaddy by us?  110 - our new registrations go with Godaddy.

As with our host CrystalTech, we recommend you call to ask questions of any registrar before you sign up. If you do not find a convenient telephone tech support number on the registrar's home page - do not consider them - if you cannot call them be assured that you will likely not get timely support if you have a problem.

We review Godaddy Hosting for specific and limited needs because of your requests but our service from CrystalTech is so superb!

(helpful heads up - remember to keep your host and registrar email address contacts current - we cancelled our Mindspring hosting account before we changed our Network Solution account registrar email address - it was a pain to get changed)

Recommended length of time to register your domain and other domain name recommendations:

Don't delay registering your domain.  Many thousands of site names are registered every day.  If your domain name choice is available today, it may not be tomorrow.  If you think you will EVER use a domain name, register it now. Not planning a web site? Register the domain name anyway, just to protect your business name.

We recommend that you register your domain name for a minimum of 5 years - 10 years is better - you will usually get the best discount for the greater time periods.  You will own the site name - no one else can use it even if you do not create the site now or ever.  Godaddy is our best registrar recommendation but don't be concerned about Godaddy or any other registrar you might choose - you can move your domain name to another registrar and not lose the money / time paid for.  It is the law.

We also recommend that you register domain name in variations if you can afford them - if you plan to use dot com - register .net, .org, .biz, .info and others to protect your name from web poachers, spammers and scammers.  You can easily point the extra domains to your primary / active site.  

Serious about your business web site? Personal web site name? Using it in the future?  Registering name variations will protect the site name - as simple examples, if your business site domain is healthproducts, a protective registration might be something like healthyproducts, or if you site is davidsweb, a protective site name might be davesweb

DO NOT LET YOUR WEB SITE REGISTRATION EXPIRE:

Expired Domain or is the domain registration expiring soon? Beware - if you let your registration pass its expiration date, an "after market" company will likely register your domain name to try to sell it at a premium price to you or someone else.  We have 50 clients and it happened to one of them. The domain was registered by an aftermarket company and it was lost by our clients.  The registration was offered to the original owner at a very high price.  The clients only other choice was expensive legal action, and that choice and cost was complicated because the aftermarket domain registration company was in another country.  

If your domain name choice is available today, register it today!  Tomorrow it may be gone.  This too has happened to us.  And once again - we recommend Godaddy as registrar and recommend CrystalTech as host!

Once again - please remember to use prorganize.com as the referring site if our CrystalTech review and Hosting hints are helpful helpful

Web Site Domain Name Registration

Highlights:

- Do not register your domain with your hosting company

- Register your domain name for 5 years

- Confirm that your hosting company or register has telephone support that is available 24 / 7

- Call the support lines of both your host and registrar before you sign up

- DO NOT LET YOUR WEB SITE Domain name  REGISTRATION EXPIRE

- please remember to use prorganize.com as the referring site if our CrystalTech review and Hosting hints are helpful helpful