When you first start out in business or come up with an idea for a new website domain name, it is really important that you take just the five minutes needed to register that domain name yourself and not delegate that step to your web designer or anyone else.
It is easy to do it yourself
Registering your domain name is quick and easy to do. Head to a domain registrar like Name Cheap and you can pick up the most common top-level domains of .com or .co.uk for around £10. What we like about Name Cheap, is that they give you Whois privacy guard – to hide your address and contact details – free of charge, and they don’t try to give you sneaky deals to entice you in.
Hosting can be set up independently
Your hosting and email can be provided by separate suppliers, and you can use the DNS settings on Name Cheap to ‘point’ your domain to those hosting and email providers. So here at Design Flow Studio, we use FlyWheel for our hosting, and we use Google’s G-Suite for our cloud email provider. We then point our domain to those two external providers. That means if you change platforms or email providers at a later date, you can simply unplug one provider, and plugin the new provider, and your domain is unaffected.
Hosting – your developer can help with this
Your developer can set up your hosting and email, however for the domain name, you have to have ownership and control over that. When it comes to hosting, we now set that up our clients with FlyWheel and hand over billing for them to pay. FlyWheel make this super easy for our clients, and they love how that works so effortlessly. We do all the work for our clients, and once they’ve paid, they own the that hosting package – so if they want to move onto a new developer, everything is in their name. We believe that is the way it should be – even if our peers may think we are a little crazy to allow our clients to be in control!
As ever, we are here to help guide you and answer any questions you may have around domain names and hosting. Schedule a chat with us.