Lately I’ve had several friends and clients talk to me about their website (usually when they had some pieces of it already in place). One of the first questions I ask is what company is hosting your site.

Quite often the answer is that the %%%domain registration%%% company is hosting or they used a great hosting company to register the domain. Either one of these answers can lead to problems sooner or later.

Go Daddy is a great place to register domains. Most of my domains are registered there. And they do offer free hosting as part of their %%%domain registration%%% service. Because their main business is %%%domain registration%%%, they don’t have the most robust hosting service around.

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When you have your hosting and your %%%domain registration%%% with the same company, you chance losing both of them if the company has problems or you fail to renew your service. Sometimes the renewal email message goes astray. I lost one of my hosted websites that way. Because I had the %%%domain name%%% registered elsewhere, the site is still mine. I also had the website files backed up. You have your website safely backed up, right?

Some people or companies snatch up expired domain names. They offer to sell it back to you for a much higher price than you normally pay. Or, if the %%%domain name%%% is a good one and not specific to you (maybe www.thegreatestwriterintheworld.com), they may sell or auction it off for big bucks.

If the company goes out of business or gets bought by another company, you could lose everything or the site could become unavailable for a period of time. You really don’t want that to happen.

Protect yourself by using separate companies for your %%%domain registration%%% and domain hosting.