On Wed, Apr 10, 2013 at 11:17 PM, Bruce Hooke <bghooke at att.net> wrote: > To most people the "effective" registrar is the company you go to in order > to manage and renew your domain and get support related to your domain so > that is how I was using the term "registrar" to keep things simple. Yes, in > almost all cases that company is simply a reseller, > Having watched this conversation go by, it's probably worth spelling out that there are three different parties involved in putting a website online, in addition to whoever develops that web site: 1. Registrar: The internet is like a phone book where nobody ever has the same name. When you've picked a name nobody else has, you pay a registrar for the right to own (or really, lease) the name you picked. 2. Hosting company: These are the people with computers that can have web sites on them. This doesn't have to be a big company - for example, I host http://timboudreau.org on an old laptop in my house (but its for personal use - my real website timboudreau.com is elsewhere). Basically this is a company with some expertise in servers and keeping them running, a very fast internet connection, reliable power, and maybe some nice tools that make it easier to create a web site. The hosting company's computers get assigned numbers - the real addresses on the internet - kind of like phone numbers. 3. Domain Name Service: DNS is like the phone book, and certain companies can publish entries in the phone book. The DNS provider takes the name you registered, and the number from the hosting company, and publishes them together. You need all three of these to host a web site. A lot of hosting companies offer all of the above, which makes sense because to someone non-technical, the above sounds like weirdly splitting hairs. But there's no requirement that they all be one company. It can be simpler if they are, but it's also easier to walk away from any one of them if they aren't. The original question sounded like it was about 1., but probably was really about 1. and 3. (?), and could maybe have included 2. As others have said, with registration, the main important thing is to make sure it's really your name on the registration. That way, if the companies you're using for 2. or 3. are not serving you well, you can take your business elsewhere and there's nothing they can do to slow you down. The 24x7 support advice applies more to 2. (not that it hurts for the others), hosting companies, as that's where the most things can go wrong (with registration, a name is either registered or it's not, and with DNS, for simple web sites, it either works or it doesn't). -Tim -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.hidden-tech.net/pipermail/hidden-discuss/attachments/20130411/496c6e01/attachment.html