Domain hosting pain

A friend of mine registered a domain with a large on-line provider.  Then she asked for help from her friends for advice on hosting her website.  She’s not a technical web expert, so this is perfectly reasonable.

I responded with what I did and that fact that I work for a hosted services company and we were a nominet registrar like the large online provider. She didn’t know that the work I did involved that.

I also gave her some advice regarding the fact that the large provider would probably provide web-hosting as part of the deal or for a bit extra per month.  Of course I did also tell my friend that we could host the web site and email, although it would be easier for us to administer the hosting and any backend changes (like moving a server or changing to a shiny new one) if we were the registrar for the domain and could look after the DNS records directly.  Otherwise there there would always be an additional delay in any domain changes.  Either way it was up to her.

My friend decided that she would prefer my company hosting it as at least she can trust me.  Meanwhile she had a rather frustrating afternoon trying to get the password to access her current hosted providers cpanel as they had not sent the password yet.  She is also trying to get them to change the tag to us.  The provider should do this for free, but not everyone does.  A domain owner can change the tag through nominet itself (if the domain is a uk top level domain).  However this can cost 11.50 per domain.  This I suspect is because an ordinary domain owner is not a member of nominet so there is a charge.

The help desk for this company also charged 50p for phoning their support.  Their online pages were also running rather slowly (during office hours).  Needless to say my friend is less than impressed with their service so far.   My friend still doesn’t have her control panel password.

What annoys me is that if I thought to actually let people know what I do and socialise more both online and offline,  I could find out what my friends need and either help them directly or point  them at the appropriate resources.

So for a start I’m posting an article that I wrote for a local magazine.  It’s a basic article and not very technical.

At somepoint I will also put the link here to my personal blog.  I’ve been under a rock for a bit too long, and it’s caused some pain points for others who did not necessarily have to go through the frustration.