Hi, There are many services on the internet that provide hosting + domain name. I've got a few questions about this though: -how can you make it certain that YOU own the domain name, and not the hosting company, and that you can transfer to another if you wish so while keeping your domain name? -around how much should a reasonable service cost, for the hosting, and for the domain name? Thanks!

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-how can you make it certain that YOU own the domain name, and not the hosting company, and that you can transfer to another if you wish so while keeping your domain name?

Pick somebody reputable. Unfortunately, I've found that even the sites that review (on the internet and through friends/family) well usually look like shady scam sites, so it can sometimes be hard to tell. Ask around, whois other people's sites to see what they're using, et cetera.

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around how much should a reasonable service cost, for the hosting, and for the domain name?

That usually depends on what you want out of it. You can get really cheap rates for storage, but you usually pay for that in bandwidth, customer service, reliability, et cetera.

In the past I've used OCS Solutions and been happy with them (they will let you register your domain independently, or they will do it for you, at which point you'd need to file a support ticket for them to relinquish it if you want to move to another registrar). Currently I use WebFaction for hosting and my domain is registered at namecheap.com. I've used register.com in the past, and not been terribly happy with them, although they appear to have improved recently.

I always have the domain name registered with someone other then the hosting company. For domain names, I generally just use GoDaddy. I had a hosting account with dreamhost. They aren't bad at all if you're looking at php / linux hosting with ssh access. I am moving more into C# / .NET development so I cancelled that.

Quote: Original post by Lode
-how can you make it certain that YOU own the domain name, and not the hosting company, and that you can transfer to another if you wish so while keeping your domain name?

Avoid Godaddy, from what I hear [lol]

I register my domains via no-ip, which gives me the flexibility to change hosting providers at whim without the hassle of actually transferring domains.

Can't say much about hosting. I'm hosting some static stuff on my github account, but that's not really a webhost per se.

Quote: Original post by MaulingMonkey
Avoid Godaddy, from what I hear [lol]

Why? I've been using them for a couple of years and having had any problems. Granted, I'm not doing much with my site yet.

Quote: Original post by Machaira

Quote: Original post by MaulingMonkey
Avoid Godaddy, from what I hear [lol]

Why? I've been using them for a couple of years and having had any problems. Granted, I'm not doing much with my site yet.

Not sure, I've had no issues with them either.

Maybe this? GoDaddy Controversies

Quote: Original post by tstrimp

Quote: Original post by Machaira

Quote: Original post by MaulingMonkey
Avoid Godaddy, from what I hear [lol]

Why? I've been using them for a couple of years and having had any problems. Granted, I'm not doing much with my site yet.

Not sure, I've had no issues with them either.

Maybe this? GoDaddy Controversies

Hmm that "fines" thing looks bad... They've got you pretty much "by the balls" if they have your domain name that you want to keep and can force you to pay anything...

I thought you were going to mention No daddy. :P

I use 1and1 as my registrar and webfaction as my host since it allows a custom php instance to run. (sockets and other features enabled).

Also it should be mentioned that domains are very very cheap. It's the hosting that'll cost you. I share an account with my brother and he got like a 5 year plan or something.

// edit oh heh that controversy wiki page actually has that website mentioned.

Ok so I got the domain name now, I went with GoDaddy anyway. I looked at register.com but they were much more expensive, and that for the same or even less service. Where could this price difference come from? register.com is twice as expensive as GoDaddy.

About hosting: any ideas there? I think that for now I have enough with just hosting some static HTML pages. I don't want banners or anything though (so I don't think I can use free hosting providers). And of course I want to be able to make my domain name link directly to the hosting provider, so I assume I'll need my own IP address, right? Is that standard?

So basically, for now, I'm looking for hosting static HTML pages, with FTP upload (a one-by-one HTML based upload interface is too much work) and a static IP address.

What could the price of such a service be per month and what are reliable ones?

I'm currently not interested in PHP or so, if I ever need dynamic pages I'd actually like full root access to the server to run any web server I want, but I don't need that yet for now.

EDIT: I'd also like for example that if you type my domain name and then slash and some directory name, that this also matches the directory structure of the server. I guess that should be pretty straightforward, but I've never done this before, do all hosts provide that functionality or are there hosts where you can't do that due to not being able to configure a DNS IP or so?

[Edited by - Lode on March 18, 2010 10:51:09 AM]

I see you already registered your domain, but anyway, I highly recommend DirectNIC, at least for domain name registration and DNS servers, I keep my domain (aeongames.com) with them, as you can see, when you do a whois on it, it lists myself for all contacts and ownership (or it should anyway [smile]).

I don't use their hosting services... can't recall exactly why, either it was more than I wanted to pay or it didn't have the functionality I wanted, I host with Nethat instead.

Keeping DNS records with DirectNIC is very cheap ($5 a year IIRR), and it has the advantage that you can enter new records at any time, so you can for example map home.yourdomain.com to your home ADSL IP and www.yourdomain.com to your hosting service provider, and so on.

Edit:

I think you'd like Nethat for hosting, I pay $5 a month (Bronze pack) for pretty much what you need + 10 email accounts, webmail and PHP support... don't know if you want to post more than 100MB worth of web content though.