MegaSack DRAW - This year's winner is user - rgwb
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As I start in the World of freelancing for the 1st time, I want to register a domain name, more for email than a website. I don't really need a website.
However, I would like to use an email that looks a bit more professional than a gmail or similar.
There are loads of sites out there offering this service, are some better than others? Or do they all do the same thing?
Any recommendations would be most welcome!
I use hover.com (used to be tucows back in the 90s). Friendly Cannucks, not sure if anyone else is better.
I got my domain through 1&1, now Ionos. I don't use their email as I got Google Apps for Domains when it was free, so my emails use gmail but with my domain. The service has been OK, and looking at their email offerings, they look pretty reasonable.
Most of the email platforms offered by domain name providers are pretty basic as best and hateful at worst so something Proper is always what I recommend.
Domain registrars are all much of a muchness, FastHosts, LCN and 123-Reg are popular.
For mail we use Google's G-Suite - it's a paid service at ~£4 p/mailbox p/month. 7 years in we've yet to have a single problem with it, it's worth every penny. The Basic option is all most people need btw.
The process is; register your domain name with one of the above (e.g. FastHosts), then go here
https://gsuite.google.co.uk/intl/en_uk/pricing.html
And sign up for a G-Suite Basic account for your email etc.
(*EDIT - this means you can have an @yourdomain.com email address btw, not an @Gmail one.)
During the signup process you'll be asked to verify ownership of the domain (usually by adding a Txt record) and then it'll ask you to add some MX Records (basically the rules of where email goes).
It's all a lot more straightforward than it sounds, promise.
Without wishing to hawk for work, we normally budget around 1-2 hours all in to set this up on a client's behalf, on a clean run with a tailwind you can have it all sorted in half an hour though.
For the domain registration the underlying product is the same from any reseller.
I'd obviously recommend my own company ( https://www.mythic-beasts.com), on the basis of good support and the fact that we don't mess around with silly, loss-leading introductory pricing.
A UK domain costs £3.75/year wholesale, so if someone offers you one for £0.99 per year, you can rest assured that they're going to try and claw back that loss elsewhere.
I'd recommend against 123-reg, based on the number of customers we've had transfer in because they're fed up with them, various shenanigans they've tried in the past such as transfer-out fees, and the fact that they do silly, loss-leading introductory pricing.
For the domain registration the underlying product is the same from any reseller.
For a domain name in and of itself, yes. But the ease of maintaining it will differ. Do they make it straight forward, for instance, to add SPF records to DNS?
I've used Xilo for many years. I have one domain with full hosting, and a second, for work which is a Mail Only MO-1 - Mail Hosting account for £15.00 per annum plus around £6 or £7 per annum for my .org.uk domain. Great people to deal with if there's ever an issue, which has virtually never happened.
Use whoever you want to buy the domain.. some companies offer a discount for the first year, then you can transfer it to wherever's cheapest after that.
If you are still searching for that perfect domain, be careful where you search. Some companies (GoDaddy etc) will register a name shortly after you've searched for it (if you don't immediately buy it), then try and sell it to you at a premium price afterwards.
123 Reg very easy to use been a custom for over 20 years.
If you are still searching for that perfect domain, be careful where you search. Some companies (GoDaddy etc) will register a name shortly after you’ve searched for it (if you don’t immediately buy it), then try and sell it to you at a premium price afterwards.
100% this
By all means have a look at different providers
But do not start search for the domain you want unless you are ready to purchase it.
Don’t even search to see if it’s available
(I learnt this the hard way With a .com back in the mid 2000s. I was for personal use so I bided my time and ended up waiting 3 years for the squatters registration to expire and thEn picking it up afterwards. As no way was I paying the inflated prices The squatters wanted)
Things may have calmed down as with instagram and twitter the importance of a website to alot of companies has reduced. But I’d still air on the side of caution
I'm on NetNerd for domain and email redirection.
123-reg always used to be the standard answer in the industry for domains only.
Hard to look past Google for email itself, purely for the spam filtering as much as anything else. It just works.
Yeah, I've been with 123-reg for decades. No complaints but then auto-renewing a domain name every couple of years isn't exactly a high-maintenance task.
I migrated to them forever ago from some fly-by-night I can't even remember now, they'd done some trickery where the name was registered to them rather than me so I couldn't easily make DNS changes.
My only complaint with 123-reg is that when renewing a (usually a .com domain) for multiple years then make sure you get what you paid for. Numerous times I'd renewed/paid for 2 years, but only 1 year was added on. Each time it was "a bug in the system" according to support, but I'm not convinced - apart from that issue they were fine.
Can’t say I’ve experienced that bug Joey.
Very true Cougar but like wise another provider took control of a domain that I owned, I had to appeal to get it back and then I immediately moved it to 123 too.
I used iwantmyname, a Kiwi company for many years now.
Very friendly people as I used to call them (I could so I called) but they have taken out their phone number nowadays.
They write themselves sometimes, don't they.