Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
In today’s Q&A, we are talking about where to register your first domain and host your websites.
There are a lot of registrar and hosting services out there, which can make finding the one right for you difficult. Many look similar, so what’s the difference? Listen up as we discuss this from our personal experience.
Do you have a question you want answered on our podcast? We would love to help you!
Click here to ask your question!
Resources Mentioned in this Episode:
- Namecheap – our domain registrar of choice
- Hostgator – the web hosting service we started out with
- Have a Question? Ask it here!
Let’s dive into this week’s question!
JOCELYN: Hey y’all, you’re listening to Q&A with S&J.
SHANE: What’s up guys? Welcome back to another Q&A mini podcast where we answer your questions about online business. Our question today comes from Mark Biggs. Mark writes:
“What service did you use to register your first domain and where did you host your websites when you started out in your online business?”
JOCELYN: All right, Mark. We actually get this question quite often and we always buy all of our domains through Namecheap.com. There’s really no particular reason why. We just heard about it when we were first starting out. We checked it out and thought that it looked good so we started using them.
It’s very inexpensive to register domains there and we have just always used them and never had any issues. Now it is important that you register your domain name through a different person than your hosting provider.
SHANE: Namecheap is not a host. They are not an actual place you can put your website. They just register domains.
JOCELYN: The reason that you want to keep those separate is because if you ever decide to change hosting companies, and you might, you want to make sure that you’ll be able to easily change that.
If something happens and your domain and host are registered through the same, say, maybe you have a billing error and something can’t be paid, then your hosting company can hold on to that domain and not release it if something like that ever were to happen. If you don’t have them registered at the same place, all you have to do is log in to your domain name provider and just change those name servers.
That might sound a little confusing but it’s actually really easy.
SHANE: You basically just point your domain, for example, let’s say you’re hosting in company A and you have your domain registered with Namecheap, you take your domain and you point it at where your website lives on that server in company A. But if company A starts making you mad, they have lots of downtime, they are not working really good, all you have to do is go sign up an account in company B, go to Namecheap and point your domain name at company B and then you can deal with company A later when you’re canceling your service.
If you’re trying to cancel and transfer over, I just had a buddy the other day and he was telling me it was taking him like seven or eight days to get his domain name and his website transferred from one company to another because they kind of hold you hostage a little bit while they are trying to do that. So never register at the same place.
JOCELYN: We really like Namecheap. They have several different tools to help you find domain names and have suggestions for alternative domain names if the one you want is taken. We just always had really good luck with it.
SHANE: All right as for hosting, when we started out we tried a bunch of different companies. We tried FatCow, we looked at Bluehost, but we really didn’t go with Bluehost. Even though everybody seems to support and promote Bluehost, we learned early on actually that’s because Bluehost pays the highest affiliate commission.
A lot of people will just say “Oh look, I’m using Bluehost. You should use it too,” but they just do that so they can get the higher commission from the company that they support. It’s important to remember too that a lot of these companies are actually owned by the same company. I think the same company owned Bluehost, FatCow, and a couple of others. Even though they are different hosting companies, they are still under kind of the umbrella of one large company.
The company that we started out with was HostGator.com and we did that because Jocelyn’s sister was a developer. She created websites for people and she was hosting on HostGator at that time. We tried HostGator. We loved them. They were easy to use, simple.
We had a couple of customer service things, we called them. We always got right through and they worked out great for us until we outgrew that. We now have private servers because our traffic is so high that we could not stay on those shared hosting servers that you start out with.
When you first start out, your website lives on a server that may host 100 other websites or whatever. Later on as your traffic gets bigger, you’re not going to be able to stay there because that infrastructure can’t support the traffic that you have so you’ve got to get private servers. That’s what we have now.
When we started out, we started with HostGator. They had very low prices, they were very fair. We never had really any downtime or anything like that. They have C panel. It’s always important when you’re looking for a hosting company, you want C panel. That’s the thing that lets you install things quickly like WordPress basically with the press of a button and it was also very inexpensive. We could afford it. It was like $6 a month or something like that.
If we were going to recommend anybody starting out, we would say go with HostGator. We had no problem with them and then use Namecheap to register your domain names and you should be off to the races.
JOCELYN: You can find links to everything that we discussed on today’s Q&A podcast at FlippedLifestyle.com/QA33. That is all that we have for today. We will see you guys next time.
SHANE: See you, bye.
You can connect with S&J on social media too!
Thanks again for listening to the show! If you liked it, make sure you share it with your friends and family! Our goal is to help as many families as possible change their lives through online business. Help us by sharing the show!
If you have comments or questions, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post. See y’all next week!
Leave a Reply