What’s the best way to REGISTER and HOST a web domain?

You got me!  Tell me…..there’s so much out there!  Oh, you want ME to tell YOU?  Well this is what I know so far….

First of all, I had to remember that a registrar is where you buy your name.  You can go and do a WHO IS Lookup to see if you can find the name you want.  If it’s available, you can buy it; if it’s not, they give you all sorts of ideas to modify it.  Note:  if you don’t buy right away, some lurkers out there know what you’ve looked at and they snatch it up and offer it to you the next day for double the price!

When you have your name, that’s not the end of your troubles, then you have to find some place that will store all the stuff you want to put on your website using your name.  That’s a HOST.  Sounds kind of like Dax on Deep Space Nine.

Dax, the host, is having this slug-like creature inserted, not unlike a domain being uploaded to a server.

Well, a host isn’t going to be nice and let you just tag along, you have to pay for the space you take up.  So of course you can buy any kind of space you want.  The more you want, the more money it costs.  Seems reasonable, right

So I went searching.  Well, here’s what I know.  I did NOT find a really cheap hosting rate anywhere.  I’m already paying GoDaddy $12/year or maybe it’s $18, I can’t remember.  I really want a new domain name, so I did some shopping today.

First, I read the article about the top web hosting sites and went to check them all out.  Well, Name.com and Namecheap.com were paid for in Euros.  I decided since I didn’t want to translate that, it would be fine to skip those.  I tried DreamHost, which in turn sends people over to Enom, which is where I have a couple old domain names. It is only $8.95 though. When I tried to find those old domains, I found that Google was holding them.  When I went to google, I couldn’t find them.  Sometimes I think this whole thing is a scam—now you see it, now you don’t! I decided that I didn’t like what I was finding out—too complicated.

I also checked out Top 10 Domain Registration.com It was another big mess of confusion trying to entice you into buying from them, but one quote I really liked:

“Of course, today, a domain name is more than just an address. It helps define your website’s online identity, and plays a big part in building the character of your online presence. Every individual wants their identity to be memorable and unique, and everyone wants their online identity to be the same. This is why choosing a great domain name and a reliable domain registration site is so important. It will help make your website stand out from the crowd. It will help give your site an identity.”

I did see that most of the sites give you a free name if you’d buy space on their server (host), so I didn’t look much further for domain name costs.  (I did have an ad in my inbox for a 99 cent domain name from Go Daddy.  I think it’s a scam to “get you in the door” since they put their price for hosting at $3.49/month instead of the yearly rate.)  Google charges $11.95 a little under GoDaddy, which is $12.00.  Gandi net is $15.00.  Register is $31!  Crazy!  It may have included extras that I didn’t know about.  Then Hover was $12.99, which was pretty close to GoDaddy!  Google is just $12.00 and it has a lot of extras, like connecting to WordPress, but it also says there is google telephone support.  I need that now and can’t find it, so that might just be a sales tactic!

All in all, I like what’s easiest, so a dollar here or there doesn’t matter to me.  Right now that seems to be GoDaddy, but I get really sick of their deals and their emails telling me my site is expiring 6 months before hand so they can scare me into giving them more money sooner.

The Evil Empire

I don’t like the Evil Empire Google, just because it’s so big, so….I’m torn.  I keep going back to trying to have everything in the same place for ease of finding it back again, so I may just have to stick with GoDaddy. That’s where cindeekarns.com is.

In the end, I chose Word Press for my register AND my host.  It was $13.00 + another $5.00 to host my blog there.  What would be nice is to have all of my domains at the same place.  That, however, would take an entirely new post to explain and includes stuff I don’t know about like DNS and mirrors and probably trolls under the bridges.

So, there you have it. Now you know as much as I do and you can also learn to design a web page from scratch!

Mmmm, Mmmmmm Good!