Understanding Hosting Packages

When building your first website, you will probably go for a hosting package that includes a free domain. That`s ok. Lots of companies nowadays offer it, simply because everyone else in the industry does. It is just a part of the marketing offer.

Changing hosts in a year or two?

But what if some day you decided to change your host? You will send your host a cancellation request, trying to move your site to new host. But hey, what about my domain name? Whos domain name? You got that domain name for free.

Domain Name Reality check

Thats when you get into trouble. Your old host will no longer receive money from you, but you still want to use that domain name. Why shouldn`t you? Search engines indexed your pages, you got some nice links from directories and social bookmarking sites, everything was going just great. Until now!

Who is the real domain owner?

Domain name that was so free, suddenly becomes unplesantly expensive. You find out that domain name is not even yours! The worst scenario that could happen, is that hosting will not release domain name, so you would have to wait for (not so yours) domain name to expire and then register it again.

Possible solution – Domain Transfer

Since hosting companies usually provide domain names only to their clients, you could also transfer your domain name to another domain registrar and pay a nice fee for that to your old host.

Conclusion

Anyway it would cost you far more than it would, if you bought a stand alone domain name from a Domain Registrar . I hope you can learn this little story`s lesson or you can always try it yourself:)