Domain name wibbling

[liv]

The more I think about it, the more I think I need to bite the bullet and get myself a domain name. I'm leaning towards teapot.org.uk (the more appropriate .me.uk is already taken, sadly). The other option is to go with my own name. I can see arguments both for and against that, and would welcome opinions.

I think I will probably keep the livredor subdomain I have for stuff related to this journal; I want to be able to point people like potential employers to my website without them easily being able to find my blog from there. Not that this is terribly secret, but it doesn't necessarily give a professional first impression.

So, a couple of questions for those who know these things. My current hosts, Portland Communications, are doing a special offer of domain name registration at £25 for two years. I know I could get cheaper than that, but I like and trust Portland, they've been truly excellent (free!) web hosts, and that counts for quite a lot.

What's putting me off is that the terms of signing up with them seem to be that you give them a credit card number, and they take money off it automatically when the registration expires. I really don't like that, I don't like giving companies I trade with access to help themselves from my card (even if I basically trust them). And it seems like it's going to be hard to get out of, too. I mean, Portland's standard, non-special offer prices are quite expensive compared to the going rate, so I'd want to shop around before renewing. It seems to be really awkward, you have to give Portland 30 days notice that you don't intend to renew the domain, so how would the transfer across work? Would you choose a host in advance, and then give Portland notice, then wait 30 days and then transfer to the new host?

Is this sort of behaviour normal from domain registering people? I've heard of people forgetting to renew their domain, and I think I'd prefer to have the opportunity to forget, rather than be locked into the system. I mean, how does it normally work when you come to the end of a registration period? Is it always really difficult to switch to a new registration service? If I decide against Portland for the above reasons, I'll probably go with Black Cat Networks, since they're cheap and I vaguely know friends of friends of the people involved.

The other issue I have is: there's a reasonable chance that I may move abroad in the next 12 months. Is there any reason it would be a bad idea to have my domain registered with a UK company, in these circumstances? I don't mind about the .uk tld, I'm quite happy with that. (Should I not be?)

Comments

[redbird]

On the first point, my domain registrar notifies me when the registration is coming due, and I then pay (or, if I choose, don't). Gandi.org, 12 euros/year. No hosting included at that price.

[karen2205]

I've only ever looked into domain registration in a crisis management situation eg. where the domain registration was expiring and I didn't want to renew it 'cos I wanted to transfer it to BCN and get the contact details changed so that I was the contact and not the people who'd been managing the site for us (since they'd disappeared).

Anyway BCN +++, beyond that I don't know a great deal.

[darcydodo]

I have no idea about the technically stuff, but I vote for teapot. :)

London.pm?

[pne.livejournal.com]

I'd suggest asking the London.pm folks (http://london.pm.org/join/); they're really quite a friendly lot and between them have a fair bit of experience with domain names and hosters and the like. (I think I heard good things about Black Cat from them, for example.)

[timeplease.livejournal.com]

I recommend Black Cat as well.

[draconid.livejournal.com]

I second the vote for teapot.

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

I use Black Cat (for my domain name, but not for webhosting or email) and have no complaints with them. As for automatically renewing, my brother lost minimalism.org.uk because he forgot his registration period was about to expire.

[liv]

I use Black Cat (for my domain name, but not for webhosting or email)
Ah, so they're accommodating about that? I just sent them an email asking whether I could register with them but host elsewhere. How does that work, and is it anything like this?

And yes, I know that forgetting to renew a domain would be annoying. But I really want something like redbird mentions upthread, where they send you a timely reminder, but don't automatically renew. Is that the case with BCN?

Domain names

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

I just sent them an email asking whether I could register with them but host elsewhere. How does that work, and is it anything like this?

No. The simplest and cheapest arrangement is to ask them just to forward all emails to anything@your-domain to a nominated address (which is useful, as I can spin off lots of unique email addresses and filter based on the "To:" field, but annoying when one of those addresses starts getting nothing but spam or viruses), and all web accesses to a tree based on a nominated URL, thus http://www.michael-grant.me.uk/<stuff> turns into http://website.lineone.net/~michael.s.grant/<stuff>. Browsers will display the latter address (for this cheapest offering), but I discourage people to use it, as I'm not guaranteeing people I will be staying with Tiscali.

HTH.

But I really want something like redbird mentions upthread, where they send you a timely reminder, but don't automatically renew. Is that the case with BCN?

Yes.

the redirecting thing

[liv]

Just a few more stupid questions. I find all this a bit confusing, really, sorry!

It seems like they're charging £10 per year for this service, which seems a lot just to do a redirect. Are you saying that it's completely impossible to pay BCN for a domain name, and make that domain name point to some webspace hosted by a free provider? I mean, your redirecting idea sort of has a similar effect, but it's 300% more expensive for something that isn't quite as good as what I want. (Nice Portland include email forwarding in their free package, you see.)

Or am I just asking for the moon on a stick?

[liv]

my domain registrar notifies me when the registration is coming due, and I then pay (or, if I choose, don't)
Thank you! That's exactly the kind of thing I want, and knowing that it exists makes me less inclined to go with Portland.

No hosting included at that price.
Well, ideally what I want is just the registration and continue hosting my pages with Portland. Just make them have a nice address like www.teapot.org.uk rather than a horrible address like livredor.p5.org.uk. Does Gandi let you do something similar to that?

Also, www.gandi.org appears to point to one of those evil metasearch thingies, rather than giving me any useful information. So I'm a bit confused.

Re: the redirecting thing

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

It seems like they're charging £10 per year for this service, which seems a lot just to do a redirect.

*shrug* They have to make their money somehow. Think of it as £0 for the service and £10 for tech support -- making sure it continues functioning when someone trips over a wire at Tiscali^* and disconnects half the Internet in this country.

Are you saying that it's completely impossible to pay BCN for a domain name, and make that domain name point to some webspace hosted by a free provider?

No, just that it costs a bit more. I'm not particularly bothered; the sums of money are small enough when you've got an income that it's more effort than it's worth to search out a better deal. (I'm paying more than that every month, after all, merely to get onto the Internet.)

[fluffymark]

When my domain expired earlier this year (registered from firevision), I noticed that it had expired but they hadn't. My domain still worked even after expiry, but if I looked at the domain management screen it told me it had expired, but gave me no notion of how I'd go about renwing it. After waiting a few months, I prodded them with emails for weeks demanding to pay for reregistration in fear they'd take it away any day soon without notice. Finally they replied and accepted my money, but only after a lot of pestering on my part.

[redbird]

Um. Sorry. It's .net, not .org.

And yes, they'll let you do that: go to www.redbird.org, that's a domain I have through Gandi.

They're default-Francophone, but everything is also available in English.

Re: the redirecting thing

[emma]

You can do that with ukreg.com, which is what I do. I'm hosted on cerebellum, and my domain is just registered with ukreg.com.