Most domain registrars now offer discount hosting as well. Don’t purchase it! We have many clients who did, and have been dissatisfied:

1. Their hosting is typically massively oversold. That means that thousands of websites are on the same server as yours, and attempting to run through the same bottlenecks of server memory and CPU speed, router and network connectivity. The result: slow-loading websites. We had a client who was boggled at how much faster their company website pages loaded after switching to our hosting.
2. Their hosting often lacks full capabilities. That becomes an issue when you want to add a blog, or a custom contact application, or do Ecommerce. Sorry, no can do - their server doesn’t support PHP or MySQL (or phpMyAdmin for the MySQL) or cron jobs, or SSH, etc. etc.
3. If you decide you want to move to better hosting, you may have problems getting your current site off their server. This was the case for one of our clients who wanted to move their site off Yahoo hosting and onto ours - and found it to be a major hassle.

Bottom line: purchase your domain registration and hosting from separate companies!

This entry was posted on Friday, August 3rd, 2007 at 4:33 pm and is filed under Domains & Hosting. 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.