Yes, or just have a web hosting company that doesn't utterly suck fucking balls.
I know a lot of people still use Network Solutions and GoDaddy, despite the fact that 5 seconds of armchair due diligence[1] would tell you that you shouldn't.
I've been hosting websites on Pair Networks[2] since (/searches email archive) 1997. My own projects, then client websites, and sites for multiple employers. Because they are awesome, when they opened PairNIC[3], I moved all the domains I control to them.
You could reduce this blog post down to "Don't register a domain name with your brother-in-law... if your brother in law is a fucking asshole who will try to rip you off."
And then factor that down to just "Don't register a domain name with a fucking asshole."
(So I guess the only reason I commented at all was because of the chance to plug Pair, who have been so awesome for so many years.)
Been using NameCheap for dozens of projects, I always use their hosting and domain registration for simplicity; especially when explaining what I'm buying for clients who have no idea what I'm doing on the backend. Despite hearing why I'm not supposed to do this, I have never really had any problems with it.
Be careful with that. You have to watch out for good companies being bought out by assholes. For example, I was a happy Speakeasy customer for a long time, but eventually Megapath bought them out. The Megapath CSRs were the least helpful people I have ever talked to and their cancellation process is deliberately broken too.
So I'm right with you on avoiding doing business with assholes. But just remember that a good business can go bad, especially if they get bought out by complete and utter assholes. Like Megapath.
This is a structural feature of modern web entrepreneurship. Through a great new time-saving product with few annoyances at a low price, one builds an audience loyal enough that they can convince investors to hand them lots of money, and then fulfill whatever contractual obligation they've assumed to pound that userbase for more money/eyeballs, driving them away. Sometimes it's not even a matter of additional revenue, but stoking the ego of investors. Google, for example, just removed size from their image search in order to 'simplify the UI' for mobile users who are sexier in terms of plausible growth; This has driven away large numbers of power users, and made it manifestly less useful than Bing.
The average lifespan of a useful tool / company is only a few years; If investors are involved there is always a dark side. Userbase goodwill is a valuable resource will eventually be tapped and depleted.
As a pair customer since 1996, I concur, they're awesome. Hosting isn't really cheap either, but IIRC they've always been in the top 5 on site availability every single year since I've been using their services.
I also have checked the three given links that are teaching exactly you said in the comment. BlueHost is another good domain name and hosting provider. Registering a name to trusted web hosting company is necessary otherwise you will have to suffer.
yes, teaching exactly what has given. That's true, It's essential to know that your web hosting company is trusted and reputed otherwise problems and hurdles will be on your way of online business success.
This is exactly one of the reasons I started NameTerrific. Dealing with domain matters can be a pain, especially if there's a conflict of interest. A bonus point: almost all registrars provide web hosting services (including GoDaddy, Namecheap, Register, Name.com, eNom etc). To them there's no better up-selling opportunity.
Hover is great. It's really easy to get started and it just works. NameTerrific delivers an excellent domain experience to the other end - the hackers/developers/geeks group. Plus it's a little bit cheaper than Hover. (NameTerrific also never sells hosting. The only "extra" product we'd consider will be SSL certs.)
The landscape has been broken for a long time. The domain industry almost never evolved in the last 5 years. There's still price war, crappy experience, hijacking and spamming.
We are releasing the API specifications in a few weeks (so subscribe to Newsletter or follow on Twitter/Facebook). Yes, it's not only a planned feature, but also a marketable feature and key selling point.
I'm not really convinced of that. If your registrar folds or turns on you, it will be painful regardless of whether you also use their other services.
You're suggesting that it's somehow more likely that they will cause trouble on the registrar side of the business if you try to move away from those other services. Which may be true but should be more than compensated for by the fact that providers with a large offer of various services are also large enough not to care about you in particular.
Will OVH even notice that I stopped using 10 or 20 of their servers, have someone connect the dots, and put some sort of hold on my domain? I find it much less likely than a small (relatively to OVH) registrar operation simply folding.
What I would advocate instead is to use a really solid registrar for a high-value domain. For example, in Poland our national registry (NASK) for .pl also acts as a registrar. And while their prices are somewhat higher than the competition (~4x), it's as solid as you can get and I know people who keep their short, or otherwise cool, domains registered sometimes well in the nineties there for safety.
Using a good registrar is key but you also want to separate host from registrar because you want to keep your content.
It is a much more common case to change hosts than it is to change registrars.
But even if you lose your domain name somehow through a bad registrar your content can also hold a lot of value and though you would take a big hit by changing domain names for a lot of sites (like blogs and other content heavy types) content is key.
See the recent incident with cyanogenmod the move to .org went rather well until the .com was given back and not having a separate host can make it so you don't even need to restore from backups/setup a new environment.
> you also want to separate host from registrar because you want to keep your content.
Some diversification is, of course, a good idea. Your team chat/irc and documentation/wiki should be hosted separately, if for no other reason, then so that you have something to work with in case of an outage on your main infrastructure.
Same goes for backups. Have them somewhere else, and preferably also locally.
There are many ways to do slice it. I'm not convinced that the one outlined in the OP is really as obvious as the author implies.
I have heard accounts that, in the past, NetworkSolutions.com (owned by Web.com) would charge a ransom of $99 to anyone who tries to move a domain name away along with their business:
For balance, I recently moved my registration from networksolutions.com, based on the reasoning of the linked article, and nothing like that happened -- there was no problem and no extra charges. Nevertheless, it's good advice to avoid registering a domain with a provider.
Thanks -- that was educational. I'm now twice as glad that I moved away from them. I recently tried to move away from Web.com (who owns networksolutions.com) as well, after they were unable to repair my server for five consecutive days. Their response to my announcement was to ignore my e-mails and continue to charge me $89.95 per month as though I was still their customer. I finally had to lodge a complaint with the BBB to force them to refund the phony charges (which they did).
My favorite story about Web.com, and among the reasons I left them, was when I started computerizing my financial records and noticed this pattern of dates for their monthly charges:
Notice anything funny? They're 28 days apart. Web.com is claiming that they have a monthly rate, but they charge it every 28 days, which automatically gives them a (30.43/28) 8.7% revenue increase over what they would get if they were honest.
I usually discount stories about shady business dealings without direct evidence. This time there's direct evidence.
Network Solutions (and others) were abusing a 5 day grace period in which refunds were available. Ostensibly this was to address typos and mistakes. Domain squatters would also abuse it by registering thousands of typos and random word combinations names and use the grace period to get a 'taste' [1] of traffic. If they thought they could monetize the domain, they'd keep it.
Unfortunately, they can often use the 'trial period' to register the domain after you search for it and then 'return' it a few days later to avoid having to actually pay for the domain.
This is good advice, not least because an avoidable single point of failure is never good.
I have my domains with a registrar, hosting elsewhere. Recently my former hosting company, FatCow, suffered a catastrophic router failure that took down everything - their home page, all customer sites, control panels, the lot. Infuriatingly, this happened right after I sent out an important marketing message. Because I wasn't registered with them I was able to move to a backup service as quickly as I could sign up for an account and change nameservers at the registrar. (Propagation took a while, but it was working for some people very quickly.)
I think you're technically increasing your points of failures by splitting domain and hosting.
You're not adding redundancies by splitting the services. Since these are mission critical services, if either fail, everything fails. Now by splitting up the services, you're increasing your risk of failure.
Take this scenario as an example. Suppose a random host will fail 1 out of every 500 days. Well now you have two hosts that could fail on 2 random days out of 500 days instead of just one host that'll fail once for every 500 days.
The above is not exact but i hope it gets the point across. I'm not saying dont split hosts, I do that myself. I'm just saying don't think you're limiting point of failure by dividing mission critical services apart. You need redundancy for that.
No: if your registrar goes offline for months you have not lost anything but your ability to update your DNS entries and renew your domain. Your registrar is NOT a mission critical service: it is the only way for you to recover if your DNS infrastructure needs to be replaced.
A dedicated DNS provider will provide a very good level of redundancy, for example DNSmadeeasy give you 5 nameservers to use which I believe are all hosted in different datacentres.
Maybe a shitty host will do this to you. I currently work for a web host and our support team will bend over backwards if that's what it takes to get a domain transferred away from us.
The title of this article should be "Don't do business with companies that utilize shady and unethical business practices."
I totally agree, I'm one of the owners of Site5.com and we would never stand in the way of someone moving a domain away. We leave it up to the customer if they want to register a domain with us or other registers.
I would also mention it is illegal under ICANN rules to prevent customers from doing this,
thanks, Ben
I work for a hosting provider, there are actual rules for registrars preventing things like this happening, I dont know what happened to you in the past but its very unlikely to happen, Registrars essentially risk their business doing this, here is a copy of the rules for .com.au namespace..
I have yet to hear a convincing argument on why planning for the edge case, which is usually a minor headache at worst, is worth it in the long run.
We can all say "it's better to have it and not need it," but some judgement should be used when it comes to the amount of calories burned just to sustain an inflated sense of contingency.
>I have yet to hear a convincing argument on why planning for the edge case, which is usually a minor headache at worst, is worth it in the long run.
In this case, the cost of "planning for the edge case" is close to zero. In fact, you may well find a reputable registrar who charges less than your hosting provider. I currently have two domain names registered with my hosting provider out of sheer laziness, and the rest registered with Namecheap. The registrations at Namecheap are cheaper (by an amount which is significant percentage-wise but insignificant in real terms).
Probably because that headache is so incredibly minor as to be not much harder than checking your email in the morning. Unlock domain, get key from old reg, start transfer on new reg, enter key, wait a few hours. All of this is automated.
The damage that can be done to a business based on DNS shenanigans is large, and you would be well advised to take every reasonable precaution. Switching to a provider that doesn't have a conflict of interest is a no brainer.
My first web hosting company ran away with my domain and I never got it back until it expired [0]. They ran away with 40,000 customers' domains. I had to learn how domains expired and catch it. I am thankful I guess, because I got involved with domain catching and made a fair bit of money from buying expired domains. But I don't wish those months of downtime and uncertainty on anyone because the hosting company went under or did something malicious. That isn't to say that registrars are immune either (RegisterFly is an example). But at least that is only 1 layer in many cases, you and the registrar. In that example, ICANN intervened and GoDaddy took over their accounts if I recall correctly. Many web hosting companies have reseller agreements, so you are stuck in between the hosting company and registrar. That can complicate things. Some even put domains in their own name rather than yours.
Many of the reasons presented for not using your web host as your registrar, such as they may get bought by a shady company, or try and lock your domain in if you try and move it, could happen just the same with an independent registrar. I don't using a separate registrar mitigates risk, and the benefits of having your domains at your host can be numerous: consolidated billing, automated DNS setup, and in some cases cheaper prices because the hosting company treats domain registration as a value-add to its primary product offering (hosting), not as a source of revenue generation itself.
The process of transferring domains these days is automated and nearly the same between every registrar I've used in recent years, regardless of whether or not they offer hosting. I have never had one that tried to lock me/prevent me from moving a domain, period, as long as you have direct access to the account at the registrar which the domain is registered under.
This does bring up one scenario that I do warn people against when registering a domain however. Always make sure you personally setup and hold access to the account at the registrar that holds your domain. Don't just let your web designer do it for you because it's easier, or you don't understand the technical stuff. Get them to walk you through it, but make sure it's your account. I have seen disgruntled web designers make life difficult for clients trying to migrate away from them on more than one occasion because the domain was registered under the web designers account.
Another argument in favor: don't stick unnecessary levels of separation between you and the company that controls your domain. Only the very largest web hosts are also domain registrars, the rest are simply reselling another company's services. If there are problems, you're stuck dealing with them through a middle-man.
The only advantage to buying both hosting and domain registration from the same company is billing convenience, while there are numerous advantages to not doing so. Just choose an accredited registrar.
Fortunately, most accredited registrars that offer reseller programs allow domain registrants to claim back their domains and manage them directly through the registrars. So there's no stuck-with-a-middle-man issue as you described.
IMO the real danger is when the hosting provider is a registrar. Domain registrars have a lot of power, because for most TLDs the registry never touches your personal information - the registrars do. The registrars set the EPP code, which is the key to transfer your domain away. A reseller generally cannot prevent a domain to be transferred away if the registrant insists to (the most a reseller can do is to keep sending locking domain API calls).
Another reason is added security. The joint registrar/hosting companies allow you to use the same account/password to access and update the site that you use to transfer and register domains.
My rule of thumb is the registrar, www hosting, email hosting and DNS all be totally separate and have unique accounts with different companies. They all use unique passwords too. A compromise of one will not compromise the others.
There's another good reason not to do this. I had a host go bust ungracefully on me a few years ago - rescuing the domain took weeks of chasing with icann...
By separating the two, you can be up and running on a new host in hours in the event your host goes dark.
> There is no guarantee they won't be bought by an ass-hole tomorrow. There's no guarantee some greedy concepts won't start to permiate their management.
In which case, you're likely to run into problems whether or not they host your site.
Part of the problem is that domain registration and DNS hosting are usually conflated, when they are in fact very different things. Domain registration is more a legal discipline than a technical one - Especially when you begin to go into registering international tld's.
For registration, I would pick a trustable company to run things for you - Small and personal is ideal. The DNS hosting, on the other hand, is probably served best by a big company with solid infrastructure - Such as the place where you host your main hardware or with a dedicated dns hosting service.
Also do research your registrar, and transfer out at the first sign of trouble. I had an important (for me) domain at RegisterFly [1]. Took some time to reclaim it after it had been transfered to Enom. Currently moving other domains godaddy -> gandi.
Contractually, you cannot use Gandi to register domains for any sites hosting user-generated content nor any content of your own which violates their ethical code. Upholding their ethical code is part of the agreement you must enter to register a domain with Gandi. If you do or support any "deviant uses of the internet", they have the right to take your domain away. It's the strangest agreement and I'm continually surprised people choose to register domains with them.
I was disappointed with Gandi in terms of security features. On the plus side, they allow you to disable password resets, but then this is fairly standard. On the other hand, they don't offer two-factor authentication or login notifications. Moreover, they inexplicably publish your "handle" under your whois information (as "nic-hdl"). This gives away the username, arguably making targeted attacks significantly easier.
I have been using Name.com for a while, and I like their approach to security. Though I must say... I once forgot my password (made it way too complicated) and in addition to a fee all it took to recover my account was to send a scan of my ID card. I think I'll write up some modest proposals for this industry. Moniker's MaxLock is too expensive and imprecise.
Domain registration in the US is a mess. I can't get my head around it. I prefer the system we have in Brazil.
In Brazil there is a non-profit organization that administers the .br TLD. All domains sold are sold through this entity (registro.br). After registration you just insert your DNS IP addresses and that's it. No worries and no complex transfer process.
If it is a non-profit company part of the government. So yes I'm not just ok but I prefer that way. Basic services like water and electricity are usually monopolies in several cities and people are ok with that.
Even if you don't buy this argument (that the registrar/host will actively make your life difficult when you want to switch service providers), a more underlying reason you should not host your domain with your hosting provider is that it means that if they go offline you are screwed and have no options.
Contrary to what many people here seem to believe: your registrar is not a point of failure during normal operations. The only thing your registrar does is to allow you to renew your domain name and to change your DNS entries; this canonical data is not stored with them.
You do not need to do that every day: you don't even need to do that every year. If your registrar went offline, tomorrow, for months on end, the only way you'd ever notice (assuming your DNS provider didn't go offline) is that whois would not return detailed information for your domain.
However, if/when your DNS goes offline, you are hosed: anyone without a cached copy of your records (which in the end is a very large number of users, even with long cache times) no longer can access your website; they are truly a point of failure.
How do you fix that? Well, you go to your registrar, whom you hope is online that day, and you change your DNS servers to point to someone else. Your registrar is your backup: they are the people you need online only during on that rare day when your DNS is offline.
Now, if you take any DNS service out there, even the most reliable, it is going to be offline someday for some reason for at least some of your users: they may have multiple locations, but today the east coast got destroyed by a hurricane, and all of your users in the relatively safe state of KY are still being forwarded to NJ? Well, maybe you want to fix that.
Having a registrar that is not your DNS provider means that there is now some chance that you can do that. When the DNS service is working, the registrar doesn't cause you any issues: if it goes offline you aren't even going to notice.
Yes, there's some astronomical chance that the registrar does something insane, like has a glitch that deletes your domain name from the root servers... but frankly, that kind of glitch is going to be uncorrelated from outages and might happen no matter where you host it: the registrar is your one truly infrastructure-mandated single thing you have to trust to not do things that are insane (but thankfully don't have to trust are online).
This "trust not to do something insane" is then then how you need to choose your registrar, and it is not how you probably choose anything else in your stack. This is much more of a legal than a technical issue, as pointed out by one of the only other comments on this thread that seems to understand this (the short one by troels).
However, having your DNS (along with whatever else: HTTP, database, anything else you may use; none of this is important: DNS is king) at the same place as your registrar is just a death sentence for reliability. You've even given up your option to just point the domain at a "sorry, we are offline, please try again tomorrow" page.
I now will point out (again[1]), that this is basic prerequisite knowledge for running a website. Before you spend time deciding things like "Ruby or Clojure", "HBase or PostgreSQL", and "Linode or AWS", you should learn how websites are put together, what DNS is, and what a registrar's purpose in the ecosystem really is.
As much as I like to think some of these other decisions can be critical to your ability to pivot later, if you don't know how a website works in the first place well enough to notice at a glance "oh, if I host my registrar and DNS in the same place I'm screwed in the case of a single outage" you have much more serious problems, and you aren't going to be able to make informed decisions anyway.
Truly, in the end, you can build a fine website using PHP, MongoDB, and hosted on a single machine in your janitorial closet; if nothing else, when it inevitably fails, you will be able to quickly migrate your DNS entries to a page saying "we are sorry we are offline: we used bad technology". ;P
Web hosting fits into that category of software like Git. So many people expect it to be simple that they're tricked into thinking it is and being upset that there isn't someone there to hold your hand.
If you don't know the difference between a CNAME and an A record, then hire someone to register your domains and setup them up, or learn enough to make informed decisions. The rash things that people do because the Internet enables them to does not excuse them.
edit: Sigh, at least tell me why you're downvoting so I know what to address.
Yes, but if you do hire somebody else to setup your domains make sure the domains are associated with a registrar account that you control. If necessary delegate nameservers but not the domain itself. Best is to do the registration process yourself.
When I was doing websites, the number of times somebody had a previous domain "registered" by their previous web developer who had the domain associated with his godaddy account.
This means of course that when you want to stick the new website up you can't without contacting the previous developer who is either very uncoperative or has flat out disappeared.
The process to resolve this is such a pain and has to be carried out usually by the person who will be the benefactor of the domain who has no idea about authorisation codes, DNS delegation or any of this stuff.
I sincerely hope you weren't getting downvoted for that second paragraph because it's quite true. If you do not understand the most basic operation of DNS, then you have no business getting into the registrar game and would do well to hire someone to manage it for you.
I didn't downvote, but if I did, it would have been for the part about Git. It's (IMHO) a very poor comparison. Git is easy to use to a point (centralized, just push/fetch), then it becomes an order of magnitude (or more) harder. Also, everyone I know that doesn't use Git (i.e. stuck on SVN) is scared to death of it because they're scared of the decentralized aspect - definitely no one thinks it's going to be easy.
Even if it were hard to use, it remains an apples and oranges comparison.
It's easy to go buy a domain and hosting on GoDaddy.
Running at EC2 scale, managing your own nameservers, etc is hard.
I still don't see the difference. People think that since they can do the first, the latter should be automatically easy, or they're entitled to it because the ramp up was easy. Pretty much how the Git conversation plays out.
> edit: Sigh, at least tell me why you're downvoting so I know what to address.
Sorry for the meta comment, but this the second comment and all the replies are speculation why it was downvoted. Maybe someone misclicked, maybe someone wanted their own comment up so they downvoted all other comments. Many of the top comments in a thread get downvoted first.
Just a guess, but I'd say you're getting downvoted because of your second paragraph:
> If you don't know the difference between a CNAME and an A record, then hire someone to register your domains and setup them up, or learn enough to make informed decisions. The rash things that people do because the Internet enables them to does not excuse them.
Why in the world would anyone take issue with that? Especially here on HN of all places? I mean, sure, I can see exceptions for non tech savvy people running a personal site or a really small business website not having to know the difference but are we so pedantic that you have to explicitly point out all edge cases and exceptions in our comments now? Sheesh. The message was pretty clear and there was nothing downvotable about it.
Not sure. I agree with the second paragraph. I am guessing it's because of the "tone" of the text. This is a generalization, but I think comments here are downvoted not because they are wrong, but because people do not like the way they "sound."
I promise it wasn't meant as elitism. If someone were to think that knowing DNS makes them elite... well, that's unfortunate.
My point was much simpler, know when to outsource it to a third party or someone you hire, if you don't know the details of what you're getting into. Especially when it's something as fundamental as the ONLY entrance point people have to your business's online presence.
This is the same criticism that was leveled last time. What do people want? Yes, I wish DNS was magically simple. It's not. It's not going to magically be easy and downvoting me doesn't change that.
It's like me trying to do anything besides changing the wipers and oil in my car. It's right there in my garage and I certainly have the tools to work on it. (To be fair, me working on my car poses more physical risk to me than a novice breaking their DNS settings or being held "hostage" by a hoster/registrar).
I know a lot of people still use Network Solutions and GoDaddy, despite the fact that 5 seconds of armchair due diligence[1] would tell you that you shouldn't.
I've been hosting websites on Pair Networks[2] since (/searches email archive) 1997. My own projects, then client websites, and sites for multiple employers. Because they are awesome, when they opened PairNIC[3], I moved all the domains I control to them.
You could reduce this blog post down to "Don't register a domain name with your brother-in-law... if your brother in law is a fucking asshole who will try to rip you off."
And then factor that down to just "Don't register a domain name with a fucking asshole."
(So I guess the only reason I commented at all was because of the chance to plug Pair, who have been so awesome for so many years.)
[1]: http://bit.ly/TNoTYN
[2]: http://www.pair.com
[3]: https://www.pairnic.com/index.html