Tag Archives: domain registration

Domain Registration Prices and Other Issues

Two common errors, in my opinion, that many people make are these:

1.  they register their domain with their webhost

2.  they use the e-mail service provided by their ISP

The reason that these are bad decisions are that webhosts and ISPs are frequently changed.

GoDaddy girlLet’s consider the domain registration first. If your domain is registered with your webhost, it makes the transfer that much more awkward and difficult. In addition, web hosts rarely offer the same level of service as a domain registrar as NameCheap does. Of course, no one else does either. Even GoDaddy. Just let me say this about GoDaddy. If you use them, you are paying too much – unless you are not going to renew your domain. GoDaddy offers deep discounts for your first year of domain registration, but they get it back when you renew. Currently it costs $14.99 to renew a ‘.com’ registration on GoDaddy as opposed to $10.87 to renew at NameCheap. I also hate GoDaddy‘s overwhelming upsell efforts – it’s difficult to find your way through all the pushy sales efforts to find your account maintenance functions. Finally, unless  you are willing to pay more to support GoDaddy‘s exploitation of gross sexual stereotypes, go with superior service and lower prices at NameCheap. If you are already with GoDaddy, transfer your domains to NameCheapwhen you are approaching your renewal date. Transferring domains can be a bit daunting to the uninitiated – contact us for assistance.

Second issue – using the e-mail address provided by your ISP. The primary reason I don’t use them is because I occasionally change Internet Service Providers (ISPs). In fact, I just did that on Friday. I dropped ComCast and went with CenturyLink. If I were using Comcast’s e-mail, I would have to notify everyone that my e-mail address has changed. And I’m not sure that ComCast would forward my mail from my old address to my new one. Another reason I don’t use the ISPs e-mail is that I have my own domain and have my e-mail associated with that domain. I actually have several domains and use one of them for my personal e-mails and virtualwebsource.com for my business e-mails. I intend to keep these two domains for the foreseeable future, so I won’t have to notify anyone that I’m changing my e-mail address for a very long time. Oh, and I do have  yahoo and gmail e-mail addresses as well. I use those when websites require me to signup for their mailing list but I don’t really want to.

If you are currently using your ISPs e-mail, i would recommend obtaining your own domain(s) and using the e-mail services associated with those domains. If you don’t want a website, you can purchase e-mail hosting for just $36/year from us. Contact us for assistance in either case.

If you are using yahoo, hotmail, gmail or any of those services for your e-mail, consider obtaining your own domain (as above) for privacy. These ‘free’ services sell your information to as many people as will buy it, not to mention the fact that Google (and probably the others as well) voluntarily hand all your e-mails and other information over to the NSA.

Do yourself a favor. Register your domains with NameCheap, obtain your webhosting from us, and use us for e-mail hosting. Or if not us, some other webhosting service. Just don’t register your domain with your webhost (we don’t even offer domain registration) and don’t user your ISPs e-mail service.