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domain registration costs

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friend of mine wants to set up a website for his business, but the website wont be ready for a while yet so I suggested registering his domain name now and sort out hosting later. No doubt some of you have gone through this process and I would like to know what costs (or anything else for that matter) he should be aware of when choosing a registrant. From my searches I have found the following important factors:

register the domain privately

get domain parking

ICANN accredited

pop3 mailboxes with web mail (rather than just email forwarding)

yearly renewal fee

transfer fee in case of changing registrant

If there are any other factors you believe are important please let me know. One thing i've read is that some companies don't actually make you the owner of the domain name (I understand strictly speaking you are only renting the domain name) which I can't get my head around, would this be the situation with some companies that offer combined registration and hosting packages who would want to make it rather expensive for you to change registrant/hosting service?
 
just buy the the domain from goaddy its very cheap very fast and moving to different hosts been using them for years..yearly renewal is also cheaper. :)

i think it was $5 for .com last time i bought one and if you use the voucher CHRIS1 you get 10% off that!. goaddy is icann certfied.

pop3 mailboxes etc will be done by your cpanel which should be provided by your hosting company.

if i was you buy your domain from goaddy. for how long you want, year two etc. then find your hosting company.
i personally use speedhosting.co.uk he's cheap and does not oversell what is server can not hold. hes correctly running on dedicated Qaudcore Xeon Server 8GB Ram :)
 
Normally use Fasthosts at work, but be wary. Rumours of their support team being outsourced to the Philipines (sp?) The main reason we used them was for their UK call centre.

Used 1&1 for my Dad's stuff, but it was mainly just parking and emails, so no issues there.

Domain registration is about £6 for 2 years for a .co.uk iirc.
Email hosting is about £10-£15 a month?
Parking is free
No transfer fees. Just change the IPSTAG.

You own the domain, they just reg it for you. All the info is in your name.
 
I wouldn't go with GoDaddy personally, but regularly use Namecheap for my domain needs.
Comes with POP mail boxes (5) and you can also get free whois protection (although if its a business I don't think it would look that good to have whois protection - some people look down on it, although I wouldn't care that much)

The yearly fee depends on what domain extension you go for - com / nets are just under $10 and there is a special on INFO domains - under $3 with free SSL certs as well.

M.
 
One thing i've read is that some companies don't actually make you the owner of the domain name (I understand strictly speaking you are only renting the domain name) which I can't get my head around, would this be the situation with some companies that offer combined registration and hosting packages who would want to make it rather expensive for you to change registrant/hosting service?
You are the owner of the domain, the company you buy it from is the registrar.

I use fasthosts myself, but there are many decent companies out there. A domain name itself is only a couple of pounds (for the common .com / .net etc) and you can just add hosting later to that.
 
I use 1and1 but there are tons out there and registration is normally quite cheap. For business purposes though you may want to think about other domains that may be useful to use as redirects.
 
Stay away from 123-reg. They used to be pretty good but are nothing but a pain in the ass if something goes wrong. My jonny69.co.uk costs about £35 a year in total for the hosting and the domain is about £3 every two years I think. I use Vidahost, their support is superb.
 
Cannot agree.
Consider using 123-reg.co.uk
We hold all of our company domains with them (approx. 25) and I have my own account with them too (around 8 domains).

I am happy to pay the higher price that they charge for .com, .net & .org domains as their control panel is extremely easy to use and extremely powerful.

Support is excellent - we recetly had the need to create a sub-domain and required "out of the ordinary" records to be added.
I was having a near real-time conversation with support via email and they sorted everything out for me.
 
I just got two domains from Vidahost.com for £5 for 2 years (each).. Great support as well. Sent an email at 22:52. Got a reply at 22:57 with the action I wanted having been carried out.
 
i've had a domain that i registered from 123-reg.co.uk for about 5 years now. it's cost me 6 pounds so far :)
 
Stay away from 123-reg. They used to be pretty good but are nothing but a pain in the ass if something goes wrong.

Agree. Used to use them as part of my last job, hundreds of domains with them. every now and then a domain would get registered but wouldn't appear in the control panel, became a right pain, they have a premium phone number for support, which we were forced to use as they never seemed to reply to emails.

I have also used dynadot for US domains, not bad, and Fasthost for UK. But now use Vidahost for all my domains. As mentioned, great support.
 
thanks for the help, the business is located in holland and many of the registrars you've mentioned don't deal with the .nl TLD (I have looked at most of them but thanks anyways), but i've found one or two that do and I think i'm better equipped to pick a good one now, thanks again.
 
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