Keep your domain separate from your webspace

I had a little website that I’ve mentioned in a previous hub and a while back the worst thing happened that I could imagine: My web host disappeared! And with it, my domain name, my web space along with all the files on it. Yep, I bet you’ll want to know a little more about what happened and how you protect yourself from getting into such a situation. That is what this article is for. I’ve learned the hard way so that you don’t have to.

Building a website, even a small one, is a lot of work. Not just creating the content and designing the layout, but also finding the place to host it and choosing the right domain name. A lot of the work involved is known as SEO and involves promoting your website, getting back links and finding ways to make it grow and become a known presence in its niche. For this reason, having it all go to hell is a nightmare for anyone who’s spent months working on it.

I was with a very cheap webhost and did the usual thing that most of us do: I got a package deal that included webspace and a domain. It made perfect sense to have it all in one place since it all belonged to one website and I didn’t know much about the subject at the time so I went along with the obvious option.

This webhost, though cheap, was quick at responding to tickets and most things seemed to run quite smoothly with them. After a few months I noticed more and more downtime of my site (when your site becomes unreachable) – once even an entire day. I could live with the downtime but the problem was that the hosting company’s own website also always went down and they had no phone number or street address so you could never find out what was wrong or if the downtime will ever end. I already started seeing that that wasn’t the ideal solution and that I’d better think of moving elsewhere some day.

One good thing was that I made a strict backup routine to follow. Every time I added a page or updated the site in some way, I backed it all up. That’s what saved me from total disaster.

So a few months later there was another one of those downtimes and I waited more or less patiently – for days, and then weeks. I managed to find other customers of the same company on a forum and it turns out everyone was in the same situation and nobody knew what had happened. To this day, we don’t really know.

Well since I had my site backed up (unlike some other poor customers), my only concern was getting hold of the domain. Luckily somebody was temporarily available to give us access to our domains through the authorization code. So after many weeks I managed to get it and transfer it somewhere else. That was my savior because a new domain name would have meant starting from scratch and building backlinks and promotion was all lost.

Yes, I know. I should have found a better webhost but there is no guarantee that that couldn’t have happened with them. The real answer is to register your domain with a very big and well known registrar such as GoDaddy. These are the most trustworthy and are unlikely to give you trouble with registrations. Then rent your webspace from an independent webhost. I’d still go for cheap rather than fancy but that’s because I don’t build huge websites like Wikipedia. For you it might be different.

This way you can avoid weeks of downtime or even the total loss of your domain and website. In retrospect, it was a good learning experience that cost me a fair amount of money, hassle, time not to mention a ton of nerves. So, be clever and don’t make the mistake I did. Keep your domain separate from your webspace. And, of course:

ALWAYS BACKUP!!!

How to use Infolinks with Joomla