[Nottingham] registering web domain

[Jon Masters]

On Tue, 20 May 2003, Martin Waryniak wrote:

> When you pay a company to host your website on a certain domain name, do 
> you "own" the domain name as well or does it belong to the company that 
> hosts your site?

That depends upon the terms and conditions of your service provider.
Usually you "own" the domain however may have to pay a
ransom/extotion/rip-off fee to have the privellege of transferring. Some
people use this as a criteria in choosing their hosting company - read
through the conditions. Companies such as freenetnames offer dialup and
keep customers by extorting excessive amounts to leave their hosting.

> And what's the situation if you register a domain name and pay for it, 
> will any provider host your site under your registered domain name?

Should you register with a hosting company then they will likely charge
you to transfer the tag representing your domain to another company.
Companies such as BlackCat Networks will allow configuration of the
nameservers as a consequence of signing up so you can avoid some costs.

> If someone does host your website, is it still your domain name for a 
> couple of years or so?

There should be a certificate stating that you own the domain - if it is a
UK domain then Nominet will send you a dead tree, if it is not then you
will likely have some electronic representation of a certificate to show
that you registed the domain. You can use that if things get nasty.

Usually people register a domain either with a hosting company or some
reasonable registrar and arrange hosting, then pay a nominal fee to
transfer to another hosting company (they need 30GBP often to handle the
amazing amount of paper work that doesn't exist :-) ). Have fun.

Jon.