Domains and Hosting

.uk has become a bit more complicated. You can now have domains without the .co bit, ie www.example.uk

Any registrations made within the UK Domain Family (.co.uk, .org.uk etc) no longer get automatic rights to register the new .uk domain. So these new .uk domains are available for anyone to register. If you register www.example.uk someone can come along and register www.example.co.uk and vice versa. When people see your .uk domain they might think it was a typo and put the .co in anyway and end up on the other persons site!

You have to make the choice. To .co or not to .co? If you only register the .co.uk you run the risk of someone else registering the .uk. If .uk becomes popular you may be stuck with an out of date .co.uk. If you only register the .uk you run the risk of someone else registering the .co.uk. People might think it was a typo and put the .co in anyway and end up on the other persons site! The unfortunate (and expensive) conclusion is that it is best to register both variants of your domain. Along with .com, .org and common mis-spellings of your domain, this could end up a costly business!

Take care when if you get a domain renewal letter in the post! You may find you get a letter that looks like a renewal letter for you domain. This is usually a rival to your current supplier trying to get you to transfer your domain to them. The first alarm bell is that it is a letter! Most domain companies will use email to notify you renewal is due. Second, it is more than £20 a year. (If your current supplier is charging you more than that, you probably want to transfer to a cheaper supplier anyway!)

We recommend Live to dot, OVH or godaddy for domain names. Live to dot have an excellent user interface for managing your domains and are one of the cheapest. The OVH interface does not register changes straight away, although the changes are made after a small delay. Godaddy is more pricy now, especially with the poor exchange rate. I would not use godaddy for .co.uks.

When choosing a provider for your domains, you need to make sure that you can change the nameservers, or the DNS records if they don't allow change of nameserver. This means that you can point your domain to any mail and webserver you like and change it when you want to. Also make sure there are no hidden charges, for example transfer out charges or premium rate support lines. If this sounds all horribly complicated then we can do all this for you, just use our domain management service.

We can manage your domain for you, for only £20 a year. We can take on as much (or as little!) of the management of your domain as you want. Any of the following services are included: paying renewal fees when they are due; managing name servers and DNS settings; web forwarding; e-mail forwarding. Just let us know what you want. You can always reach us by phone on a standard rate phone number.

We offer hosting for all websites we design at £75 plus VAT per year. Alternatively your site can be hosted on any linux server, subject to survey. Existing sites can be transferred to our servers for us to maintain at the same price. Customers who want to manage their own content will be offered a hibuilder site. We do not offer FTP access, control panel access or SSH access to new customers. Unfortunately we cannot offer any recommendations for other hosting services.