Are you aware of bundled services (ie phone, voice, and TV)? There’s a certain appeal to things that can be done all at once by a single provider. You know, hands off, nothing required, just send in your payment information. The problem is that sometimes you may want to pull these things apart. Over time this becomes difficult to do.
A common problem or common scenario that you run into is a bundled services for Internet hosting. This shows up when you want to put up a website and the web provider provides the domain, the web hosting and the maintenance, all for one low price. This sounds good up to a point. The problem that you run into is that at some point you may want to split these things apart. For a lot of providers that offer bundled services, taking them apart is difficult.
This become very difficult to break apart when you start to have problems. You realize that you don’t actually own your own website, so be very careful of this. Go Daddy for instance, doesn’t offer the support, but they do offer domain registration and their web hosting as a bundle, which tends to be very attractive, but if you ever want to move their services, it becomes very difficult to do.
Hostage Situations
What you want to avoid is being held hostage when things go bad with the provider. You may find that they don’t provide the level of support or you run into personality issues. Now won’t let you have access to your website content and this can be very frustrating and possibly even involve legal issues.
Ideally you want to be in a position where you control your own domain by using a domain register like bulk register or I-name. You can even go with godaddy by itself. You want to use a separate web hosting company like hostgator or bluehost, and then have your web hosting support done separately. Now, some of these companies do offer the support with the hosting.
Depending on the situation that may or may not work for you, but try to avoid smaller resellers. Most of the larger companies do offer reseller accounts to people. They will basically they have a master account in which they charge you a small percentage of what it might cost otherwise and they take care of everything for you – until something goes wrong.
Master of Your Domain
Then it becomes very difficult to move away from them because you may find out that you actually don’t own your own domain. This becomes even harder now with the new rules of GDPR, based on European security. It used to be that if you check a domain name, you could look at the who the owner was and who the technical contact was. This way you could make sure that you were in fact the owner of your domain. This has become very difficult to do any more.
It might take a little longer and require a couple extra accounts to setup your website, but it gives you flexibility in the long run. If you outgrow your web hosting, there are lots of resources that make transferring it easy – especially if you are using WordPress. Domain registration is not likely to change because their really isn’t an advantage. By the time you save $1 per year, you may have given up some admin tools. And if you have problems with the person maintaining your site, you can simply turn them out. You want to be careful so you don’t get held hostage.
