Do not register a domain name with your hosting provider

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

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.

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.

http://www.ripoffreport.com/web-com/web-hosting/jacksonville...

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.

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.)

The title of this article should be "Don't do business with companies that utilize shady and unethical business practices."

http://www.auda.org.au/policy/current-policies/

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.

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.

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.

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.

By separating the two, you can be up and running on a new host in hours in the event your host goes dark.

In which case, you're likely to run into problems whether or not they host your site.

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.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Registerfly

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.

You will get a better understanding of the hosting and domain business

The key point for me was, there are so many resellers, and most resellers are terrible and dont live long

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.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4502451

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

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.