Why Your Domain and Website Hosting Can Not Be the Same Company

As business owners begin to dive into the wild world of the web, they quickly are caught up in a slew of advice, technology, terms, tools and well meaning advice from every relative, staff member and individual younger than them. This can sometimes cause a problem in understanding what is important and what is just not.

Take some of my most “hated” advice. Web designers hate it, Techy Geek relatives hate it, and the office networking guy usually hates it as well. In fact they work pretty hard to convince you my advice is bad, evil and severely mis-understood.

What is that advice you ask? It’s this: Do not host your website and your domain (www.nameofyourco.com) with the same company or with anyone you work with, are related to or with your designer or It guy.

Before I give my explanation… let’s make sure you understand a few details. To do that properly… let’s go back a few years and talk about your cell phone. In the late 90’s when you got a cell phone the phone company you signed up with (Verizon, Southwestern Bell, etc..) gave you your cell phone number (512-123-1234). Better yet, if you ever decided to leave their company and go to another – they KEPT your number! That’s right – they KEPT your number. You had no choice in the matter. I clearly remember agonizing over this decision, I wanted to dump Southwestern Bell badly!  I had recently moved and the service was horrible in Washington, DC and with the crazy roaming rules (something that is now long gone) I was paying out the nose on top of it all.

I waited it out until I could not take it anymore. I finally signed up with Sprint and said goodbye to my first ever cell phone number. This was a big issue for me because at the time I worked as a Consultant and I lived by my cell phone. I had no office phone, I was 100% travel. Now I had to go through the company to get new cards (painful), contact all my current and old clients (double painful) and hope my buddies and friends would find me again. Remember Google, Facebook and LinkedIn did not exist at this time, so if you lost someones number you went to Yahoo or AOL and dug through the white pages to try and find them again and their cell phone number was never listed.

Luckily now it is super easy to “port” your phone number between different cell phone carriers. Your Domain name (www.NameOfCompany.com) is like the phone number in this scenario and your cell phone carrier is like your website hosting company. The phone number (aka Domain name) is important to you and your business and you want to keep control over it at all times. The same is true for your website hosting company – you want to maintain control over that account – because having your website go down or having your Domain name get locked will devastate most businesses. If your domain name gets locked it takes down your website and your ability to send out emails. Can you keep your business going without email?

Here is a story about my buddy Steve who had his domain account locked. He has a small consulting company in Virgina. He was using Go Daddy as his domain provider (where he purchased his domain (www.NameofCompany.com)) and as his web hosting company, its easier to write one check. He hired a local IT company to maintain his companies email servers.  Well the IT company did not keep up with the latest patches one day (it happens all the time – these boxes get attacked 20,000+ times a day) and a spammer hacked into the email server. The spammer set up shop, created a new email account and went to town emailing millions of pieces of spam via this new account. Next thing Steve knows is his email is down, the website is down. He calls his IT company – there is nothing they can do – his domain provider (Go Daddy) has locked his domain name (www.NameofCompany.com) down for spam complaints. Because he has his website hosted with Go Daddy as well, he is locked out of his website.

In Steve’s situation, he created a new domain name (with another company) and had to get a new website built (remember they locked him out of his account – so he could not even get the website files). In a few months, Go Daddy did un-lock the domain and the web server. However, the damage was done.

How do you prevent this from happening to you? Never work with Go Daddy? No. Go Daddy is a great company and should not be blamed. All of the domain providers will do what Go Daddy did. It’s the only way to stop spam and the legal implications connected to spam. It was made worse for Steve because he had his domain and website with the same company.

The Lesson:

1) Do NOT host your domain (www.NameofCompany.com) and your website (the content) with the same company. Keep them separate. For Example: Go Daddy is my domain provider for all of my domains and I use Bluehost to host my websites.

2) Do NOT allow your IT guy, web designer, family member or neighbor host your website. You can host your website for $60 to $95 per year. Why? you may ask… well check my next post for the scoop on why you need to host your website with a separate 3rd party.

-Jane

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