http://strom.com/awards/275.html
If you are in the market to become a master of your own domain,
here is everything that you need to know but that few people will take the time
to tell you. I last wrote about this
a year ago in WI #225, if you want some historical perspective:
Today's essay is written by my friend A. Lizard.
He wishes that he could have had this information when he was shopping around
for his domain name long ago.
While this seems obvious, it is especially important in the case
of domain registration and hosting. Not reading the fine print can jeopardize
your ability to do whatever you had in mind with your site, whether you are
planning to do business with it, transfer it, or host controversial content. Or
not understanding what you bought could cost you your domain and all the work
and money you put into promoting it. Find the legal information in "Terms
of Service" (TOS) or "Authorized/Acceptable Use Policy" (AUP).
Also look for restrictions on the use of the hosted site.
Non-commercial/personal only? No adult content? Other content restrictions?
Fine print saying, "We own any content you post?" (Geocities actually
did this once on their free web spaces and changed their mind when users pulled
their sites en masse.)
Make certain your
intended use is consistent with the TOS before
you contract with them. If you are really getting a low monthly price, check
the setup fee. I got an ugly surprise that way once. Get legal advice if
necessary. If you get any information regarding interpretation of the TOS from
the provider, get it in writing and save
it.
Finally,
make sure you read the information regarding the domain registrar: Look for
restrictions on domain transfer and make SURE you own the site you bought.
Finding out what a vendor has to say for itself is just a matter
of going to their site or their ads. The bad news, if any, about a provider
will be in neither. For user experience with specific host or domain service
providers, try www.eopinions.com, slashdot.org and www.google.com -- just search
on the proposed provider name.
When I look for a vendor, I check user reviews and comments on
providers that look interesting, then check with a few of the authors of these
comments to make sure the people and the opinions were real, not astroturf.
(Astroturf refers to phony grass-roots public opinions about an organization
coming from employees or PR firms.)
Go to www.domainnamebuyersguide.com and look at the "Legal
Ranking" page. See if your proposed choice is represented and check out
their comments, especially the CONSUMER ALERT icon.
Ok, now it is time to get down to business. Your first major
decision will be picking where you are going to register your domain, called a
registrar in the business. This is the company that handles all the
administrative details about your domain, but doesn't actually host your actual
web content. You want a separate company for each task (registrar and hosting),
because they require two different sets of skills.
Unless you already have a host provider picked, make sure your domain provider has a
"domain parking" option, this means they will provide a spot on the
web corresponding to your domain required for the technical portion of the
records so that it can be registered. This is NOT a real web site, this simply
means that requests for www.yourdomain.com will be pointed to a "domain
reserved" page hosted on the registrar site, with none of your content on
it. This is usually but not always free, so make sure of the charges if this is
an issue. When you fill out the forms, make sure to check "domain
parking" ON.
Should you use your existing ISP or web-hosting provider to host
your domain? Probably not. Due to the different economics of an
ISP vs. a specialized hosting provider, an ISP usually has to charge the user
much more per month. No sense in you picking up the tab.
Should you use your existing ISP to register your domain? Emphatically,
No. There are two reasons. The main reason has to do with control. Your ISP
usually put their own information in one or more of the contact fields and they
may keep control over the password to change this information. This gives them
control over your site. In the event of a business dispute between you and your
provider or your deciding to change providers, this could be a serious problem.
If the provider goes broke, you might not even be able to find anybody to
contact about changing providers. Having control means you can keep your site
running.
This is the situation with respect with NameZero, and I wouldn't recommend them for hosting for this reason. THEY own "your" domain. Anything you register is actually registered to them. Once the free trial ends, you'll have to buy it back for inflated prices. Best to look elsewhere.
Network Solutions, which once upon a time was the only registrar in the world, is
overpriced and has many user
complaints. I don't recommend them either. For
more information, go here.
Register.com
charges $35/year. This is overpriced for commodity domains (.com, .net, and
.org). Their non-commodity domain service is more interesting for .biz, .info,
and over 30 foreign domains. [ed. Note: Strom has used Register.com for several
years and likes them a great deal, and doesn't mind the price.]
GoDaddy: I've been using them, and they charge
$8.95 a year for .com/.net/.org domains. Their turnaround is fast (two days),
and I've had no problems with them. Eopinions doesn't have a listing for them.
Finally, check out domain providers using OpenSRS as a back end. I'll probably be
using one in future. OpenSRS providers cost a few more dollars per year, but
offer two important features. First, you have complete control over all contact and registration information
online either from your domain reseller or from OpenSRS itself. That is nice.
Second, if your registrar goes out of business, or you have problems
getting your changes entered due to technical or customer service problems at
your registrar, you can go as an end user directly to OpenSRS and change everything there yourself via a web
form. And, most of the OpenSRS vendors also have similar TOS agreements, too.
To get a list of OpenSRS providers, send an email request to sales@opensrs.org.
The OpenSRS registrars have a third advantage, and that is they
make it easy to transfer registrars easily. With others this can be expensive,
and in some cases more expensive than creating the domain initially. For
non-OpenSRS domains, this usually requires some actual paperwork to accomplish.
You have to print forms and snailmail them to the registrar along with your
photo ID. Someone at the registrar has to manually process them. If you're
planning to give a domain as a gift, set it up in the name of the person you're
planning to give it to begin with and simply change the contact addresses
later. Email contact with the provider *should* be pointed at you so you can
resolve any problems *before* you give the gift.
One example of an OpenSRS provider is EasyDNS.
While I regard their $25/year cost as a bit high, and their optional service
DNSplus plan is even more expensive, it and other extra-cost optional services
offered provides complete user
control over all technical issues
connected with the domain down to the MX/SOA record level. While this is of no
special interest to anybody who is not an expert, this would be of great value
to that expert. If you're shopping on price, compare among the domain registry
sites you will get on request from OpenSRS.
When you register your domain, you have to put in your
contact information. This seems obvious, but has a few issues. I don't
recommend putting your home address or phone number here because people can
find out this information quite readily with a tool called Whois. Because this
information is quite public, I definitely don't recommend putting an unlisted
phone number into your domain registration. To get an idea of what kind of
information is available, go to www.easywhois.com and enter any random domain
name.
If you don't want your own name in the Whois database
(because you have heard that spammers love to send email to these people), or
you are registering a business organization domain, do as I did. Put in a
non-personal email address. If you don't yet have an address, get a free one
first and change it to a permanent address like noc@yourdomain.com or postmaster@yourdomain.com right after getting the hosting set up.
I would recommend that you get a post office box address
for the domain registration address. If your domain registry can't contact you
via email or phone, they may snailmail your reminder that you need to renew. If
you or your company has moved, you may discover a problem by having your domain
has been unplugged. Some very large companies and many individuals have gotten
caught that way. If you're an individual, this is even more important. There
are many people on the Net who aren't especially sane, some of which may be
looking for you. Don't help them find you by making your home address
available.
Making sure your contact names and email addresses are
non-personal is even more important in a business. It is quite possible that
any individual contact name for the network administrator or whoever is
supposed to handle technical issues with the domain or billing for registration
renewal won't be working there by the time renewal time comes around. Create an
address to handle domain-related business and make sure that several responsible and knowledgeable people monitor it.
Making sure the postmaster@yourdomain.com is always pointed at whoever
is responsible for the domain is good practice in any case.
More importantly, if a problem affecting other sites
appears to have come from your
domain (e.g. spam from spamtard@yourdomain.com), and the individual email contact addresses
don't work because their owners no longer work for the company, the next complaint about your domain will
go to your Internet Service Provider. The first notice you may get that there
is a problem may be when your company email or website is unplugged from the
Net.
Once you have a registrar, you next want to find a place to
actually host your site.
What's important to you depends on exactly what you're trying to
do. Figure this out before you go host-shopping. The technical details do make a difference. This is most
important if you have any intention
of doing any sort of e-commerce on
your site.
There are many host provider search engines that provide
information on hosting providers. I like Hostsearch.
c|Net and Internet.com have search tool as well. Hostsearch has a wide range of
useful search options, including cost, server OS, web server software, and data
transfer per month. Here is what I look for when I am searching for a hosting
site:
·
Total file
space on site. While this may be important, most web sites don't take up that
much physical storage -- 50 MB is usually plenty, unless you have plenty of
graphics.
·
Bandwidth
allocation per month and cost per megabyte if your users download over that
limit? Remember that every time a user browses a page through your site, that
user is downloading that page and that counts against your bandwidth
allowance! If you aren't running multimedia or graphics-intensive content,
unless you have reason to expect a lot of traffic, this won't be that big a
problem.
·
Streaming
audio and video support? If you plan to put out multimedia content, take
another look at the above criteria, every time your user downloads a big audio
or video, your bandwidth allowance just
took a hit.
·
Server
type: Just save yourself trouble and look only in the Unix server category. And
while you are at it, don't worry about server-side FrontPage support. This is a
tool you are better off without. Some of you might argue with these, but I'll
leave that for another essay.
I
would stay away from the free hosting providers because they usually don't
deliver what you need. For example, you don't really get your own domain, but
something like yourdomain.freehost.com.
One
other thing to look for. Common Gateway Interface or CGI allows the browser to
run programs (scripts) on the server. These programs are commonly used for
processing form-based mail, guestbooks and page counters. While this is not of
great importance to the novice, not having access to CGI may be a problem for
you later as your sophistication increases and you want to do more things with
your site.
If your web account doesn't support CGI script-based form mail and
you just want to handle mail forms, go to LI-Scripts. Some of the
non-remotely hosted scripts look useful. The advantage of form mail is that not
all browsers handle the "mailto:" tag properly and if you're doing
this for an organization, you might not want to give the public a direct
contact address for the company.
Good luck with becoming master of your own domain. As you can see,
navigating the waters of these vendors isn't simple, but if you make the right
choices for registrar and hosting provider you should have years of great
service from both vendors. Of course, you still have to get your site up and
maintain the content, but that's another story entirely.