If you’re going to host your own .com website, you need two things: A hosting account and a domain.

Though we’ve already talked at great length about warning signs when buying a hosting account, precious little has been said about how to avoid getting burned when buying a domain.

Though domains are usually significantly cheaper than hosting accounts, less than $10 per year for a single domain, we tend to buy many more domains, causing the cost to rack up quickly, and they are much more critical to our websites. After all, if you suddenly lose a hosting account, if you have good backups, you can be back online within a day or two. If you lose your domain, you have to start over.

So how do you avoid getting burned on your domain purchases? Here are five things to look out for when finding a new registrar that avoiding can help keep you safe.

1. Never Host with Your Registrar

It’s always a tempting offer. Many Web hosts will offer you free or deeply-discounted domains when you purchase a hosting account with them. Indeed, these can be great deals on paper but they come with a steep price: uncertainty when you decide to leave the host.

The problem is that you are far more likely to change hosts than registrars. However, what happens to your domain if you decide to switch hosts? The answer is not always clear.

In some cases the price of renewing goes up drastically, making it a more expensive option than a regular registrar. In other cases, the host may actually refuse to let you point the domain to another host and make it nearly impossible to transfer it to another registrar, often times charging very high “termination fees” for the privilege.

In short, whenever you buy a domain at a discount on the back of a hosting account, it is a bit like buying a cell phone contract. The company expects to make back the expense over the course of your hosting contract and, if you break early, you can pay dearly. Best to pay full price and get the domain elsewhere, especially since it is usually only a few dollars.

2. Watch Out for “First Year” Deals

A lot of registrars will advertise really amazing deals on domains for the first year, sometimes as low as a dollar or less. However, they usually do this because they inflate the price on years 2-100.

Since changing registrar is a pain, often times a bigger hassle than switching hosts, most registrars know that you’re pretty much locked in once you buy your first year and that very few will go through the trouble of switching for a better deal.

So, it’s better to consider the price for a certain period of time, say five years, than simply throw down the money needed to register the domains for a single year.

3. Remember the Addons Too

If you register a domain you probably do more than just obtain the actual .com. You probably add on Whois privacy protection, SSL certificates or other addons that can drastically raise the price of the domain.

A lot of registrars heavily promote great deals on the actual domain but inflate the prices on other services; other registrars offer mediocre deals on the domains and throw the addons in for free. Confused? It’s understandable.

Just be sure to factor in all of your addons when considering the price of a domain and to look at the price of those addons for all years. After all, some registrars will run “first year” specials on those as well.

4. Use a Trustworthy Registrar

Though the domain tasting scam has largely been done away with, (registrars would reserve names abandoned in their shopping carts to hold them for higher prices when customers returned later), there are still other ways that a registrar can scam their customers.

These include making it almost impossible to transfer a domain away, not letting the customer actually own the domain, instead leasing it to them, and adding hidden charges. Though outright domain scams are fairly rare, thanks in large part to the efforts of ICANN, there are still plenty of ways a registrar can sneakily make things more difficult and milk more money out of customers while still technically following the rules.

It is best to avoid working with any new registrar and, the same as you would with a new host, look up reviews of the registrar to make sure that they are on the level.

5. Try to Use One Registrar if Practical

Finally, if you have a good registrar, it’s best to do as much of your domain work with them as possible. A big source of frustration with domain registrars is transferring domains from one to the other so keeping that to a minimum by sticking to one registrar is probably the best way.

After all, even if another registrar is a dollar or two per year cheaper, the headache and time required to make the change likely to make it not worth the effort. Furthermore, the value of an honest and dependable registrar is worth far more than any reasonable amount of savings.

Bottom Line

In the end, most registrars are going to charge about the same amount per domain per year, roughly 7-9 US dollars per .com per year. Most provide roughly the same amount of service, though some offer free privacy and free phone support, and the end result is usually the same.

Your main goal is to make sure that you find a trustworthy registrar that is easy to use and reliable. Once you have that, you can then move forward knowing that, even though your hosting situation may be in flux, you at least have a stable home for your domains. That will make any other challenges you face with your sites that much easier to handle.

Tags:   backups • domains • godaddy • icann • registrar