Five Best Web Hosting Companies

When you're ready to take your data into your own hands and run your own blog, own your own photos, and host your own apps, it's time to find a good web host that can put it all on the web for you, give you the tools, bandwidth, and storage you need, and support you when you need help. Thankfully, there are dozens of great companies looking for your business, and this week we're going to look at five of the best, based on your nominations.

Earlier in the week we asked you which hosting companies you thought were the best and offered the best combination of price to features, bandwidth, storage, and customer support. You came back with over 300 nominations for over a hundred companies, but sadly we only have room for the top five.

The poll is closed and the votes are counted! To see which of the contenders you crowned as the champion, head over to our weekly hive five followup post to find out who won, and discuss your thoughts on the winner!

Dreamhost

Dreamhost is one of the web's most popular hosts, offering both standard shared plans starting as low as $8.95/month and dedicated server plans for customers with larger bandwidth and availability needs. The company has a reputation for regular perks and added features for its customers, including one-click installs for blogging and gallery software that make getting your own site up and running fast and easy. Dreamhost isn't afraid to offer you valuable features either: unlimited email accounts, support for Google apps, unlimited bandwidth, unlimited databases, and more. Customer support is available when you need it, and the company has a great money-back uptime guarantee. You can check out all of Dreamhost's plans here.

Sponsored Deal: Sign up for Dreamhost for $2.95/month (includes free domain name)

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Hostgator

Hostgator rolls out the red carpet for its new customers with unlimited bandwidth, unlimited disk space, tons of easy to install site templates, and an uptime guarantee, all starting at $3.96/mo for their most affordable plans. Even their low-end plans feature unlimited email, 1-click installs, and a $100GOOGLE ADWORDS credit for all of your customer-building needs. Choose the plan that works for you, and the longer you sign up for the bigger discount you get on your monthly hosting bill. You can check out all of Hostgator's plans here.

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Bluehost

Bluehost starts its shared hosting plans at $4.95/mo, and for your money you get unlimited bandwidth, unlimited disk space, unlimited file transfer, unlimited email, a free domain registration, and more. Even their basic plans offer unlimited hosted domains, domain parking, e-commerce features, and more, including one-click Wordpress installs, databases, and more. You can check out all of Bluehost's features here.

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Linode

You can host your web site or photo gallery with Linode, but unlike other traditional hosting companies that offer shared hosting solutions, Linode offers Virtual Private Server hosting (VPS) where you spin up a virtual server with the memory, disk space, and file transfer that you need for whatever application you're building or web site you're hosting. Some users even use their Linode servers as remote desktop replacements, others use it as private, cloud-based application servers, and others use them to host their webapps, developed applications, and blogs. You get full SSH and root access on your servers, guaranteed resources, and your choice of linux distro on the servers you purchase. Prices vary depending on the type of server you're looking for and the resources you want it to have, but start at $19.95/mo. You can check out all Linode's offerings here.

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A Small Orange

A Small Orange hosting reminds me a bit of what some of our other contenders were like earlier in their lives—homegrown hosting companies with a serious focus on customer service rather than size and scale. With A Small Orange, you can get a variety of plans with different bandwidth and disk space options that also feature unlimited databases, unlimited email addresses, unlimited subdomains, and more for as low as $35/yr ($2.91/mo). Few of their plans offer the same kind of unlimited disk and bandwidth options you'll see from the big guys, but A Small Orange makes up for it with plans to suit every budget and every need, detailed stats, bit-by-bit upgrades for people who have needs that fall between plans, and more. Plus, A Small Orange is committed to real, quality customer support, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. You can see all of A Small Orange's plans here.

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10 things you MUST know before you register domain with anyone.

The following article was a piece we originally wrote for a marketing page we put up at DomainWarning.com — but we found that a lot of our customers wanted us to keep a copy right here on the website because they were constantly referring their friends and colleagues to it.

Suffice it to say,easyDNS does not engage in any of the tactics described below, but they are widely used across the industry.

General practice tricks

1. “Transfer-out” fees

Buried in the fine print of a registrars’ “Terms of Service” will be a hidden fee authorizing them to charge your credit card a “transfer-out” fee if you move your domain to another registrar. Often times, this transfer-out fee is 2 or 3 times the cost of the original registration.

This practice violates the ICANN policy on domain transfers. In most cases if this happens to you a simple call to your credit card company will have the charge reversed, if you notice. Registrars who use this practice play the numbers game as many will not.

2. The fine print from hell

Most people (read: nobody) actually reads the long, odious Terms of Service for anything they buy online. Some registrars bury truly chilling things in these terms like the aforementioned “transfer-out” fees and in one mind-boggling case a “power-of-attorney”.

3. “Pay-as-you-go”

This is where you make a multi-year interest-free loan to the registrar. It works like this: You register a domain with them for example, 5 years (perhaps to obtain a discounted rate), you expect your domain name to be registered for 5 years. Think again, some registrars will pay the registry for 1 year and pocket the rest of your money.

Then for the rest of your five year term they’ll renew each year for one year. Usually this is coupled with a strict “no-refunds” policy, so an odd situation occurs: they stand to make more money from your original registration if they lose you as a customer before your full 5 years are up, so providing poor service to the point where you leave actually adds to their bottom line.

You can use a Free whois lookup tool like EasyWhois to verify the real expiration date for your domain. It should match up with the number of years you paid your registrar for.

Whois database scams

4. Whois edit fees and locks

Every time you register a domain name, the details of that domain registration must be published in a publicly accessible database called Whois.

One of the functions a registrar is supposed to be providing to you is the ability to change those whois records. Some registrars (especially the bargain basement outfits) register your domain for a dirt-cheap price and then ding you with an “administration fee” when you want to edit your Whois record.

Some others may also “lockdown” your domain for 60 days everytime you make an edit to your record, preventing you from moving the name out to another registrar.

5. Premium whois privacy services

Because your domain record is public for all to see, some registrars want to upsell you to “privacy services” or “whois masking”, “private registration”, where they put their own info in the whois record instead of yours.

The important thing to know here is that in the eyes of the domain Registry to which all the Registrars interact, and the Registry’s oversight body (like ICANN, or in Canada, CIRA), whoever is listed in the domain whois record as the domain Registrant is the legal owner of the domain name. Keep that in mind, if you use a service like this, they own the domain, not you, notwithstanding whatever contract or Terms of Service you enter into with them to “own” this name on your behalf. If it lands in a dispute proceeding it will be an open and shut case: they own the name.

Taking it one step further, some “privacy” services will get you to sign up for the whois privacy service and then they turn around and happily offer to sell your true data to anybody else who cares to pay for it.

6. Mining whois and domain slamming

Because all the data is there for the taking, spammers and marketers “mine” the whois database and harvest registrant data including addresses, fax numbers and email addresses. This is a real problem, and there have been very slow moving Whois database reform processes creeping through ICANN as well as CIRA in Canada.

In the meantime though, people may wonder why is it that shortly after they register a domain name, they start getting all kinds of marketing spam in their mailbox. This is because their email address is being harvested by robots from the Whois database. There is a free service to protect your email address called MyPrivacy.ca.

The variation on this is some registrars (and there is one outfit who is particularly notorious for this) which is mining the whois database for registrant information, and then mailing out what look like renewal invoices for either those domain names or variations of them.

Unsuspecting recipients think they’ve received a renewal invoice on their domain and then remit payment, initiating a domain transfer without realizing it. Surprise, you’ve been slammed. In the worst cases your website and email comes crashing down as your DNS services terminate with your old provider.

Domain lock-in (a.k.a You can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave.

7. The registrar-lock

There has historically been a real problem with “domain slamming” (see above) and unauthorized domain transfers, so the “registrar-lock” was created to protect a domain against this. If the registrar lock is set, nobody can transfer your domain away from you. This is actually a good thing and best practices include having this set for all your domains. The sharper registrars enable it by default when they register or transfer a domain for you.

Alas, this lock can become a real problem for you if it is turned on and the registrar will not turn it off, or give you the ability to turn it on or off yourself.

8. The domain auth-code

Some of the Top-Level-Domains (TLDs) run on a protocol called “EPP” and to further guard against unauthorized transfers, a domain must have an 8-character auth-code supplied before it will transfer. Current examples are .BIZ, .INFO and .ORG. The current or “losing” registrar holds this code. You need it if you want to move your domain away. Hopefully they will give it to you.

Traffic and monetization scams

9. Domain parking

You may not know this, but domain parking is big business. You know, when you click on a link somewhere or make a typo entering a web address and you wind up on some crapola “search page” optionally throwing up a million pop-up ads? That is a parked domain and the larger players can park thousands of domains and make literally millions of dollars “monetizing” them via domain parking.

You know who has access to thousands of domains? Domain registrars. Some of them offer domain registrations and rock bottom prices just so they can monetize the parked names. This may not bother you, but some people don’t realize they’re paying for something their registrar then uses to generate more revenue for themselves.

(Update: since the time of writing one registrar in particular rolled out a “Make money from your domains’ parked pages” initiative, which surprised me since I knew them to be one of the biggest parked page monetizers around — they make millions per month monetizing their customers’ parked domains — until I looked at the details: Packages start at 3.99/month. They are actuallycharging their customers for domain parking monetization. What audacity. If you actually have a domain that’s actually worth something parked, take it to a parking service. They pay you to park your pages. Not the other way around).

10. “Free” URL Forwarding

Some people may wonder why the price ranges vary so much for domain registrations and what the difference is between somebody who offers everything but the kicthen sink for $2/year while others charge more than 10 times that much for basic DNS and URL forwarding.

Well the low cost one often has other tricks up their sleeve for making money, either by adding your domain to their parked pool (above) or in this case, they offer “free” URL forwarding for your domain, and then sell pop-up or pop-under advertisements on your domain. You know, those things people like so much.

Conclusion

There are many gotcha’s in the arcane and Kafkaesque world of domain name registrations. There is no free lunch, the rock bottom priced domain registrar has other plans to boost their revenues and at the end of the day a good rule of thumb is….

You get what you pay for

So if you want to register your domain with a registrar who doesn’t play any of these games, a domain registrar who:

1. never hides any fees
2. pays the registry for the same number of years you order, up front
3. gives you direct, unfettered access to your whois records, your registrar locks, your auth codes and even total control over your domain’s DNS settings like hostname records, mail exchangers and nameservers
4. offers a free whois email privacy service and will never sell your data to a third party
5. who doesn’t “monetize” your domains
6. a domain registrar who answers the phone and basically doesn’t try to upsell you or sell you a bunch of services you don’t need or want, who is courteous, professional and has over 12 years experience providing rock solid domain and DNS services…

How to Choose and Purchase a Domain Name

In his book Ultimate Guide to Optimizing Your Website, SEO and online marketing expert Jon Rognerud shows you how to build a high-performance website and get top ranking on all search engines. In this edited excerpt, the author outlines how to go about selecting and purchasing a domain name for your site that will help people find you.

Choosing and purchasing a domain name is an extremely important part of designing your website, because that becomes the name (and brand) of your website. To buy a domain name, you can do so directly from your web hosting provider or through a separate domain name service (a recommended option for those using their own servers). If you're using a separate domain name service for your server, make sure you choose one such as no-IP. com, which assigns you a static IP address, the numerical address that identifies your computer. If this address is ever-changing (as it is with some Internet service providers), you won't be able to successfully assign a domain name to your server. I personally use Register.com, Namecheap.com, or GoDaddy.com because I like the independence that these services provide.

The process for signing up for a domain name works the same way whether it's through a hosting provider or a separate domain name service. You'll be asked to enter the domain name you want to register into a text box. The service shows you the extensions you can choose. Generally, you always want to go with .com because this is the most popular domain name extension and easiest for users to remember. Also, Google likes .com, .org and .net domains a lot, even though it states it doesn't matter. This is likely because .info and .biz can often be seen as spam sites or thinAFFILIATES SITES.

In terms of what domain name to use, this is where keyword optimization comes into play. Don't fall into the temptation that many webmasters do and use something catchy and creative for your URL. It might be more memorable to potential visitors, especially if you use a lot of offline marketing, but it won't get your site ranked high in search engines. Ultimately, you'll want to use keywords to create a domain name that's both memorable and likely to be ranked in the first ten listings of search engine results.

Go to GoDaddy.com/domains/searchbulk.aspx and enter keywords that you're thinking about, and GoDaddy will format them and check the various extensions and names. It will automatically check to see if they're registered and remove ones already taken, leaving you with a list of keyword-rich domains that are available for you!

If your desired domain name is taken, the domain name service will recommend other selections you could use. This can be helpful, since sometimes it comes up with suggestions that might rank better than your original choice. Generally, the best domain names are short, contain no hyphens and offer an excellent one-, two- or three-word summary of what the site is about. An example of an excellent domain name could be cheapknives.com. It's short, contains no hyphens and, if it's pointing to a website selling affordable knives, perfectly summarizes the main point of the site. One hyphen in a domain is OK, but more than two starts to look a little "shady" (i.e., not search and user friendly).

Another alternative when it comes to domain names is buying one that's already established or expiring. This is a popular tactic used by internet marketers to generate traffic for their websites. You can find these types of domain names anywhere, from eBay to specialized services selling them (which can be found through a general Google search). For instance, you could use SnapNames.com to bid on a name that's already taken. On this site, you enter your contact and billing information, the domain name of interest and your bid price. When the name becomes available, SnapNames.com will purchase it for you. This eliminates watching and waiting for the name. 

Here's a list of where you can buy/research domains:

• NameJet.com
• Namecheap.com
• SnapNames.com
• Afternic.com
• Pool.com
• Sedo.com
• Flippa.com (look at the previously sold area)
• DomainTools.com (whois.sc)

There are also auctions specifically for expired domain names on such sites as eBay and Flippa.com. Go there and start searching. You can buy existing domains, sometimes with existing content, and gain the history, traffic, links and PageRank.

Most folks who sell a website/domain will show you traffic charts and money charts. Make sure that it's not inflated and that you can look at it over time. One month is simply not good enough. Make sure you also ask about how traffic has been coming to the site, and ask to see server logs. 

Once you've selected your domain name, you need to register it. Be careful whom you select to handle your domain registrations, as losing your domain name could put you out of business. Use a tool such as RegSelect.com, which can help you compare prices and options of domain registration companies.

All registrars require the name of the company or individual who owns the domain (the registrant), the individual authorized to handle daily matters (the administrative contact), and the person who handles all things technical (the technical contact). Whoever possesses the registrar username and password is essentially in control of the domain, despite the fact that the legal owner is the registrant, so be careful. Choose a complex password, as this could protect you from being hacked. Hackers could have the opportunity to change ownership or servers associated with your account. Try to find a registrar that allows you to "lock" your accounts. Finally, avoid registering your domain name with your web hosting service. This could complicate a domain transfer, should you decide to change hosting companies later.