Aplus.net Blog

Last time, we discussed whether to choose one company to register your domain and provide hosting, or to go with separate companies for each of these services.

If you decide to use one company for both services, then you should figure out up front what’s important to you in a hosting provider — lots of bandwidth, or perhaps something as simple as pricing — before you get started.

If you choose separate providers, you’ll have to coordinate the connection between the two. This isn’t all that difficult, but it can be confusing to those of us who aren’t very tech-savvy. You’ll need to know what a name server is, for starters. When your domain name is registered, it’s placed on a name server. The name server effectively “publishes” your domain into an IP address, which is the location of your website on the Internet. If your hosting company is different than your registrar, then you must coordinate the details of what name server you’re using between the two. If you choose one company, you don’t have to deal with it.

Unless you’re a developer or plan to run extremely high-level applications from your hosting plan, you’ll probably want to keep things simple by just choosing one company that can handle everything — registration, hosting, marketing, etc.

Fortunately for you, the domain registration and hosting industries are so competitive these days that companies are eager, and qualified, to take care of all this for you. So, you’ll probably never have to worry about such things as coordinating name servers.

Do you have any personal stories to share regarding your experience trying to get that perfect domain name registered? We’d love to hear about it! Sound off in the comments and share your experience with the Aplus.net community.