Hosting your site with your domain registrar

Question

I have heard that hosting your website with the same company that you have registered your domain with is a bad idea. Is this correct and why is this so?

Answer 1

I have heard this also but no one has ever been able give a logical answer, because there isn't one.

Answer 2

Because it's not their core competency. There are companies dedicated to hosting that are possibly more affordable, with better service selection and customer service.

Answer 3

It's not necessarily so, but they tend to attract those who have no idea how to manage their own website and who can't be bothered to find better. Basically, their selling point is that it's easy, not that it's good.

Answer 4

Speaking from my experience of having arranged hosting and domain registration for hundreds of sites: it's generally a good idea to keep domain and hosting separate.

Domain registrar hosting services might cut it for very low end sites, but are usually a joke when it comes to running a real site. Too many of my clients have found this out the hard way, after insisting on bundled hosting that came with a domain they registered before we met.

For example, Google on the woes when using Go Daddy to host ASP.NET AJAX apps.

By the same token, trusting your domain name to a host is a leap of faith that makes no sense to take. To many hosts fold, leaving your domain registered in their name and locked, or are just plain unprofessional about transferring the domain if you part ways.

Your domain name is your brand. You can replace a failed host in 24-96 hours of DNS propagation, but if you lose your domain then you just lost your search traffic, backlinks, users with bookmarks, etc.

Anyone who tells you it's smart to combine these services is either speaking from a lack of experience or has been phenomenally lucky.

Answer 5

Many people feel that this is a bad idea becuase you're "putting all your eggs in one basket". It's not unheard of for a host to shut down suddenly, and for previous customers to have a very difficult time regaining control of their domains. It may also not be as easy as you might hope to transfer your domain away from a host who doesn't want to lose your buissness.

Another reason that applies in many cases is that many companies provide a single service well, and everything else is mediocre. If you use a company that is primarily a domain registrar for your domain and a company that is mainly a hosting provider for your web hosting the services you get are likely to be of an overall higher quality.

Answer 6

Having hosting and domain at the same provider is not a bad idea. Not bad at all. In fact, few of my friends have that setup for years without any problems.

IMHO, it can only be better than hosting it separately, since DNS changes are usually visible instantly on the web server machine as well (as it usually uses the same DNS).

Answer 7

In my experience domain registrar's usually don't have the core experience in hosting that you'd want for medium and large scale sites. This could be a big deal when you need support down the road for one reason or another.

Hosting a small site, perhaps something HTML, or PHP-only would most likely be fine. PHP is so prevalent and dead easy to configure you really can't screw it up.

For anything that requires custom configuration, say running a Rails app I'd always go with a company that has the experience to help you and give you support along the way.

Answer 8

There isn't really any good explanation for the stories you've heard - many registrars have perfectly competent hosting sides, successful hosting companies buying registrars (and vice versa) are not that uncommon.

Some of the scare stories may have emanated from a nightmare scenario whereby your registrar (and host's..) building blows up, at which point you may lose your initial dns and your server, stopping you from pointing your secondary dns at it, as you might if the hosing was elsewhere. But this sort of situation would be quite rare, and avoidable depending on your own system redundancies.

So, in short, no, I don't believe it to be correct!

Answer 9

If you have a reasonable quality hosting company (and you should never consider anything else) then they won't stand in the way of you moving, so methinks that consideration is moot.

If you are a developer then you are likely to end up with more than one domain/site to manage, and in that case I would argue that the determining factors are ease-of-updating and convenience. Plus DNS changes, as someone else has said.

So in other words, same company for both == good

Answer 10

The rationale I've heard is that you don't want your web site and domain records hosted in the same data center (the company providing the services is less relevant). That way, if the data center suffers a prolonged outage, you have other options like redeploying your site to another hosting provider and changing the DNS records.

Answer 11

Make the decisions separately. If your chosen host happens to be the same as your chosen registrar, so be it, but you should be picking the best possible host and the best possible host. ("best" being determined however you like - price, value, features, whatever)

I've found that they're rarely the same. I host with Slicehost (and some MediaTemple) and EasyDNS handles my domains. I picked each independently because they best fit my needs. Neither one provides the other service, and that has never been an issue.

Answer 12

I have my domains and host separate. For me it's about being easily able to change host (regularly if needed to get a better deal) without having to worry about transferring domains about (which sometimes costs to do).

I host my domains with 123-reg who IMO arn't going to be disappearing off the face of the planet anytime soon and have full control over DNS myself and have good prices.

I've been stung before with having a webhost registering the wrong domain for me, having poor support and then disappearing off the face of the planet with several months of my money. I then had to go thru the hassle with nominet to get my domain moved elsewhere. So to me its a no brainer to keep them separate.

Answer 13

Hello,

Its really a long discussion question..But it depends on person to person with there personal experience. But if you are with a good provider I dont feel it should be a issue .. to do research before purchase is the best way to make up your mind.