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Your Domain Is Your Lifeblood

Published Monday, August 11, 2008 by bloggerblognet84084 | E-mail this post

A simple message this one, but a really crucial one, research your domain registrar, choose them with care. A bad registrar can kill your on-line business, stone cold dead!

I have recently shared a customer's nightmare with a supposedly reputable domain registrar. All they wanted was their domain pointing to a different DNS server (the server that tells the internet where your website is), a simple request, they received no response from any of their emails. I didn't like their silence and suggested we actually move the domain to my registrar instead, more emails sent, more silence, weeks of it!

This was a big problem for both the client and myself. The client had a product launch and wanted to use my technology. The problem being my technology requires my DNS servers, not somebody else's! Time was ticking, they had become prisoners and I was about to lose a development job! Thankfully it was wrestled from them in the nick of time, but that could have been a product without a decent website.

Worse can happen, another developer I know had some domains registered with a company that lost their records completely. Thankfully none of these were business critical but if you lose control of your domain you may not be able to prove you own it or ever regain control.

When registering a domain, here are three simple tips:

Will you own the domain or will the registrar? This is a common way to be caught out, many of the 'register for free' sites do this, you need to check the small print. The registrar could be the ones who end up making money out of your carefully built reputation, you could end up starting again under a new name.
Do a search, are there lots of complaints about a registrar online? I just Googled a registrar and found hundreds of pages of complaints, including news articles on high profile tech sites and 3 whole forums dedicated entirely to moaning about them - one has over 750 members.
What do they charge for? Quite often registration is cheap, but if you wish to change something you find yourself slapped with a $50 bill. Again, check the small print; look at their terms for moving for example.
Don't make assumptions. The registrar my customer was using is a subsidiary of one of the biggest and most respected ISPs in the UK, yet they have a track record of failing to respond to customer requests and server failures. Big does not necessarily mean good, this applies to web hosting in general as well.

I can't stress this enough, with an established online business your most precious asset is your domain name. Don't risk your business for the sake of saving a few dollars!

Good luck with your new venture!

David Pook is a web developer with a specialty in large content managed sites. He has worked on both public facing and intranet sites in the public and commercial sectors including sites with over 50,000 fully managed pages.

He has recently formed Sqoo Media where he has developed a flexible and easy to use content management system with the aim of taking his experience to smaller organisations to free them from the prison that is static content.

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Your Domain Is Your Lifeblood

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Blogger BlogNet97797: Your Domain Is Your Lifeblood

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