Domain Names and Hosting
Posted On: 2008-03-18
There's an old saying that has probably been around for centuries that warns people about keeping all their eggs in the one basket. Sadly these days the warning that's inherent in that old saying seems to get forgotten by so many people who are looking for the easy way to do things, the cheapest way to do things, the most convenient way to do things.
Sometimes you can get away with the easy, cheap, convenient way of doing things if you're lucky but quite often that old saying is still very, very relevant even today and failing to pay attention to it can often cause a very painful bite on your posterior. There are quite few mainstream webmasters here in Australia who are currently being savaged by that old saying, their online business is going down the toilet and, because they took the convenient path, there's not much that they can do about it.
Everyone seems to want a bargain when it comes to web hosting and mainstream webmasters here in Australia are no different. Like many other webmasters around the world they also like to do things the easy way so when a host offers domain name registration and cheap hosting as a package, it's way too hard for them to resist. That's rather sad because, if they had been able to resist such a 'good' deal they wouldn't be in the mess they're in now.
You see the host they signed up with has been have been having trouble … lots and lots of trouble … about three months of trouble … where servers would go down and stay down for days and webmasters couldn't log in to their control panels or FTP to the servers. If that wasn't bad enough people were getting two and three monthly accounts after they had already paid; domain names suddenly stopped being registered; new accounts weren't being set up and existing domain names weren't being renewed.
Now you might wonder why on earth anyone would want to stay with such a host. After a couple of outages that last for days most of us would have gone to another host and uploaded the backups that we always keep of our sites. I know from the complaints on a well-known Australian webmaster board that most of these people wanted to leave too … but they couldn't.
Some hadn't bothered to keep backups of their sites offline so they needed to get into their control panels to do database dumps and round up other files. Unfortunately they couldn't because the control panels were down for days and weeks and even if their sites were up the control panels weren't.
But even those who were wise enough to keep backups of their sites were still glued to this crappy host because they'd taken the convenient way out when they registered their domain names. The host was also a domain name registrar and how convenient was it to register a domain name at the same time as you're signing up for some hosting?
Of course it was very convenient until the wheel fell off and people wanted to start moving their hosting to other providers. That was when they found that they couldn't access the part of those host's site they needed to obtain the codes that would allow them to transfer their domains. Some rang, some emailed, some even called in at the host's offices - two small offices in the corner of a building didn't quite match the image or the impression that was generated by the host's website - but all to no avail.
Ok so some were savvy enough to immediately think about the upstream domain name registrar. If you didn't know before then let me tell you that all of the small cheap domain name registrars have a bigger registrar upstream from them and this host was no different. Their upstream registrar was Enom and what was Enom's response to the situation?
Some guys were lucky and Enom took steps to remove the control of the domain from their downstream registrar but others were less fortunate. It seems the Enom told quite a few unhappy customers of this host/registrar that they needed to contact the host/registrar and get them to allow the domain names to be transferred.
Unfortunately for those guys the host/registrar is still very difficult to contact and as recently as the weekend the owners of domain names registered with these guys could still not be transferred.
Now I hope you can see where taking the easy, cheap and most convenient way out is not always the most sensible way to do business. If you're going to register a domain name then for goodness sake don't do it with the same people that you are going to be hosting with. If you're going to register a domain name don't choose the cheapest registrar simply because it's going to save you money.
Your domain name could become the single most valuable thing you own so don't leave it in the hands of cheap registrars and don't tie the domain name to your hosting. The other lesson this mess has to teach people is that you get what you pay for.
When the servers started to go down and the support began to disappear all those people who signed up for $9.95 a month hosting discovered what they had actually paid for … and it wasn't very much.
So if doing business online is important to you learn from the mess that so many others are going through right now.