December 2003
Many people have the misconception that domain registration and hosting
are the same thing. This is completely untrue, and could prove rather
costly error to your business..
When you go to register a domain you are registering
the rights to use that specific domain name. To keep things organized
it is not actually just the domain that gets registered. ICANN
associates a number with the domain name, thus keeping your data in
an organized record.
There are some sketchy businesses who claim to be
registrars and just in fact rip
people off. If I am going to register a domain I make sure I the
site is on the ICANN
Accredited Registrars list.
What you do with your domain beyond registration is
up to you. You can
- forward it to another site
- place a parking page on it
- host a site on it
- throw up some revenue scheme...
Your host is the actual site which holds your site.
Once you register a domain you can forward it to a host and then list
the site with your host. There are many different types of hosting with
many different features.
Typically open source derived software is cheaper
than proprietary software. For this reason I like Linux hosting more
than Windows hosting. Most things available with one are hosting type
are somehow available with the other, but you should think of what type
of interactive elements you may want to add before you pick a host.
A few important things with hosting are
- reliability - for most hosts you would expect uptime of over 99.9%.
in addition it is important to know that your host has a functional
business model and that it is not just going to go away some day
- customer support - technical know how and rapid customer support
are a must if you are planning on making a living off the internet
- type - Linux and Windows hosting support entirely different features
and languages
Lets assume the unthinkable happens...lets say your
host goes away...now what? You want to be in control of your own domain.
Typically hosts charge a premium amount to register your domain, and
it is not always a treat switching it over to another registrar or host
if you do not like the one you are using.
I have used high quality hosting and some that was
of exceptionally low quality. I had technical questions for GoDaddy
when my site went down. After being blown off or passed along for three
days I got a new host and have used them ever since.
In addition to poor customer service you may find
that your registrar does not have the technical know how to handle your
request because they are too large to train all of their personnel.
Recently GoDaddy has also had errors which have prevented
some of their websites from being spidered by Google. Glad I dropped
them as a host a long time ago!
Imagine how hard some people are trying, but can't
get traffic because they are having problems with bad hosting. Eventually
new people may keep trying harder and harder until their site is viewed
as spam by the search engines.
If a registrar provides bad hosting they can still
likely exist. Some people will still buy hosting with their registration
(just like getting milk while at the grocerie store.) If a host provides
bad hosting eventually they will go out of business.
Registrars: as long as its ICANN
Accredited and reasonably priced that is all I care. In the past I have
used GoDaddy and
Network Solutions.
Network Solutions is rather expensive, but it seems between most the
other registrars that at least one of them have a sale going on about
all the time.
Hosting: The host I would choose
would depend heavily upon my goals with the sites. I use both Dreamhost
and 3.75 hosting.
Dreamhost
- world class customer service and tons of technical know how. (to save
$25 on your hosting enter 'jabber-mikebrown'
in the promotional code section)
V7 - John Scott's
hosting business. Just listening to his horror stories from hosts he
had in the past made his daily backed up, reliable hosting an obvious
choice for a large database driven website of mine.
3.75 hosting
- exceptionally simple and usable interface. The biggest thing I like
about them is that they charge by the bandwidth and disk space (and
not per domain). If you had a bunch of small sites they would be perfect!
Please note that one time I changed my credit card and they shut my
sites off. I chewed them out for that. I would not host my primary site
with them, but I think they are good for test sites (especially because
they are exceptionally cheap.)
If you want you can look up the registrar, registration information,
and host of any website using the Whois
Source. The whole point of this article is that hosting and registration
are both necessary, but it is frequently bad if they both come from
the same place.
