WeBlogged

When you have a website, there are actually three different major parts that you need to know about and understand. Especially if you are working with an awesome creative firm like XPRT Creative to develop a superb, problem solving, useful, effective and aesthetically pleasing website. (plug? what plug?) Your web developer will need you to understand these things, so if you are considering getting a new domain, or hiring a new company to host or build your site, this is important stuff. Read on, read on.

This is actually a three-part series. I will link the other parts from this post as they are available.

This what you need to understand in order to take control of your domain and your website, and not get bogged down in the technical gobbledygook that can come with all things domain.

1) DOMAIN: this is your web address … www.whatever.com. Your domain is registered with a place called a Registrar. The Registrar sometimes provides hosting, and sometimes not. Registrars have to follow specific rules regarding your information, domain updates, and domain transfers. I’ll talk more about transfers in another post. When it’s available, I’ll link to it from here.

2) HOST: this is basically the computer that your web pages are sitting on, so the whole world can view them. It’s the physical hard drive space that you are alloted to put all your web files, graphics, videos, etc. Usually hosting is a separate and additional charge from the domain charge. More about hosting later.

3) E-MAIL: your e-mail associated with your domain (address@whatever.com) can be “hosted” wherever. Many people use their host provider to also provide e-mail services. It’s probably the easiest way. Some people use an outside service. Although your e-mail is tied to your domain name, it is not required to go through the same server for the host or domain. More about e-mail later.

So what does this mean?

Ok, so technically, you could register your domain with a registrar, like Network Solutions, Register.com or GoDaddy among thousands of others. You can host somewhere else, and have your email client be from a totally different location that your domain or your hosting.

Domain registration should cost you about 10.50 a year, max. If you are paying any more than that, change registrars. It’s NOT WORTH it. (For those of you who have been in this business a while, we’ve come a long way from the $35-$50 per year domain registration, haven’t we?)

If you own your own domain, and especially if you have someone managing your domain for you (like your web developer), you should ALWAYS check your domain name contact records to make sure you are listed as the owner / or registrant. A good way to do this is to check the WHOIS at Internic.com where you can check all the contact information.

It is not uncommon for web developers to leave their own contact information in as the Owner of the domain. Not only is this ILLEGAL, it is poor practice. The contact OWNER NAME should be YOU. Period.

The contact e-mail for the domain admin contact (different from the owner) — this is the e-mail that will get all notices regarding your domain (expiration, renewal, transfer, etc), and if you have someone managing your domains, it should be an address your web developer has immediate access to. This is the single most important piece of the domain contact information. Anyone who has access to this e-mail address can basically do anything they want with your domain. Access to the admin e-mail address listed in your domain records is important and necessary to take care of things like installation of SSL, domain transfers and anything else behind the scenes that a web developer might need to do to make sure everything is working how it should.

That fabulous company I was telling you about earlier, XPRT Creative, well, they use a specific address for domains they host so they can better serve their clients and take care of all of the notices and renewals to make domain ownership stress a thing of the past. However, following good and legal practice, XPRT Creative will only list the owner of the domain as the owner in the records for the domain. (We responsible web developers never list ourselves as the owner, but we may put our e-mail for the admin e-mail so we can provide awesome service to our clients.)

Ok, well. Enough tech talk for one day. Chew on this and I’ll post about the remaining two major pieces of the domain / hosting puzzle and how the pieces fit together very soon. In the meantime, go check your domain records. Make sure you are listed as the owner. If you are not, contact your peeps — your registrar, your web designer or whoever is managing your domains and request that you be named as owner. Any good domain manager person will have no problem with this. Keep in mind, that once you change the main contact information, your domain will most likely be locked from transfer for the next 60 days. Registrars do this to protect you from getting your domain hijacked. Or so they say.

Check back later this week. Or better yet, subscribe to my RSS Feed and you’ll get notice as soon as the other pieces are posted.

Go on to Take Control of Your Domain Part II.

Just my 2¢ anyway!

© 2007 Jennifer Poyer

Tags: best practice, domains, hosting

This entry was posted on Monday, January 28th, 2008 at 12:21 am and is filed under Best Practices, Email, Internet, Web Design, Web Design Tips, Web Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.