Website Gotchas 101

So you want to make the leap on to the interwebs, I mean webtubes. You want something bigger than your FaceSpace, err, MyBook page. You know those social-thing-a-ma-bobs, right? But you don't have big enough pipes coming to your house? What do you do?

You can pay someone like Hurricane Electric $1/month to host it (or GoDaddy, GKG.net, and hundreds if not thousands of others out there). But how do you choose? Here's how:

• Gotcha Number One: Warm Body Technical Support

Before you lay down a single buck, before you even register your domain, pretend you have a technical issue and call the potential company's technical support line and see how long it takes to get in touch with a real, live human being. Don't press the option for the sales line, that'll answer up fast as fast can be. No, use the option to get to tech support. This will gauge how fast you'll get service should you really need it. Invest a little time now so you don't have to pay more later to fix it.

I will use this to point out that you should never, ever - under any circumstances - never use acmeinternet.com. Even if they PAY YOU to host your domain! In my experience in trying to help a customer get away from acmeinternet.com "support" (or lack thereof), we could never get in touch with a live human being. I could never get an email answered. I could never get a support ticket opened at their website answered. Literally this has gone on for months. This brings me to a second point.

• Gotcha Number Two: WHOIS Registration informaton

Never, ever, allow someone other than yourself to be listed as the owner, administrative or billing contact for your domain. Say you have a website jockey who is going to build your website - that's great. But do you want to list your auto mechanic as the owner of your car? Do you list your handyman as the owner of your house? No, of course not. Then why would you list your website admin as the owner of your domain? If you really want to, list them as the technical contact (only!), but not the all-important owner/registrant, administrative, or billing contacts. Take a look at my roysdon.net domain WHOIS to see these fields I'm referring to.

Why not list your web admin as the owner/registrant, administrative or billing contact? Because it can cost you over $1,250 to fix this mistake if you have to go through ICANN's Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy (URDP) process and pay someone to verify that you really should be the owner of your own domain. You may have to wait months to get this resolved should your web admin get a little strange and have some attachment issues with your domain.

Don't think this can happen? Well, happy trails to you, and I wish you all the best and hope it doesn't. I've seen the other side, and helped folks get control back of their own domain. Their domain where they were not getting customer referral emails and costing them thousands and thousands of dollars in lost sales revenue. It's a bit nasty and I wouldn't wish it on anyone.

• Gotcha Number Three: Privacy Guard

Don't use privacy guard features that hide who owns your domain. Privacy guard, Domains by proxy, etc. features mask who owns the domain in the WHOIS information.

But does it really? This is a very minor hurdle for a lawyer with a clue to get past. If you're trying to hide what you're doing, don't be online. But assuming you're a business, then why do you want to hide who you are? It just makes Gotcha Number Two harder to verify! You can't tell if you are the registered owner and contact for the domain or not.

If you're a private individual with a hobby site, or a business owner who works out of your home, get a cheap PMB somewhere for less than $5/month. AIM Mail Centers works for me.

Ok, since I called this a "101" post, let me explain a few things now that I'm done with my soapbox issue.

• A Domain Name (like roysdon.net) is what many people think of as a website. It's not, there are many other pieces to it and a web site (like roysdon.net) is just one part. A domain name is a series of entries in the Domain Name System (DNS).
• Domain Name System or DNS is essentially a glorified series of phone books or operators that get you from point A to point Z and tell your computer where to go when you want to visit a website, send an email, or other tasks online.
• A Registrar, fully known as a domain name registrar, are the entities who can register a domain name (more on this in a bit).
• A web hosting company can provide a number of services for you. They can host your website, your email, one or both, and many other services.

Some companies are both a Registrar and a web hosting company. Some, like acmeinternet.com (stay away!), are just a web hosting company, and they go through a Registrar like Tucows to register domains. Remember Gotcha Number One? Yeah, here is where it comes into play. Not only can you not get in touch with any live person at acmeinternet.com, if you call Tucows to talk about the problem, they won't talk to you. They only talk to domain resellers like acmeinternet.com, and they'll tell you to go talk to your reseller. You just have to keep insisting that your reseller won't talk to you and hope you get someone with a clue at Tucows' compliance department. Literally it takes months, especially if you have a website jockey who is continuing to hold on to your domain and telling Tucows to ignore the requests that the domain's real owner is sending in.

I say, why have a middle-man? Why not just go direct with a company that is both a Registrar and a hosting company? One cook, one kitchen, less confusion. You can verify who is a Registrar at ICANN's Accredited Registrars list. This will then let you pick what top-level domain (TLD) you want (.COM, .NET, etc.) and then forward you on to another site listing all the Registrars for that domain.

Myself, I've used a variety or Registrars over the years. For the last 5 or so years I have used GKG.net and have been very happy with their service. They were one of the first to support IPv6 DNS servers. I don't know how well their hosting service is as I self-host on my own servers.

However, not all Registrars can register any domain. Most will have all the "big" generic top-level domain (gTLD) names, like .COM, .NET, .ORG, but not some of the newer or less popular domains. For instance, GKG.net doesn't offer .MOBI, which I don't think is that important, but when you're marketing a brand, you may want all the biggest gTLDs. For roysdon.mobi, I went with a Registrar I've used for years, the giant of them all, GoDaddy.

Let me stop right there for a second and say that I personally don't like to refer or recommend GoDaddy because I feel their ads exploit women and sex. For this reason, I use GKG.net for all my Registrar needs, except .MOBI.

But from a technical and business stand point, GoDaddy have the Domain name Registrar Market and web hosting market, hands down. Their free Total DNS product alone makes it worth while, even if you're going to use hosting elsewhere.

I will make only one recommendation for a simple hosted website: Check out Google Sites for free hosting. It just works, but you don't get the full control of a fully customizable hosted domain. You get what you pay for and one size doesn't fit all when it comes to customization, but for free, this is great if it fits your needs. This will work for probably 99% of small local businesses who essentially want to have a business card-style of webpage and simple email hosting. I use it for centralized calendaring for my family, and it just works. The only downside is that not all Google products integrate with Google Sites (but this has gotten better over time).

So, for less than $12/year (it varies by gTLD), you can have your own domain registered, and host it free at Google Sites. Upload your logo, put your catchy text from your business card, and be done with it. You can always pay later to have a professional website builder later on, but in the meantime it just works and what people really want is there.

Some folks don't want to step out and get a domain and do the wrong thing until they're 100% ready for it. I say jump right in, and just be sure and print out and store your account info for later on. Google's Page Rank technology does care about how old a domain is. The older a domain, the longer it has been online, the more authority Google thinks it has (plus other factors), as opposed to fly-by-night places. So the sooner your get your domain, the sooner you start that clock ticking. Search for Google for Modesto Cisco and see why it matters.