Domain and hosting: the mistakes that cost you

Domain names and hosting pass for technical subjects. They are first of all questions of ownership — and that is how they create situations that are hard to get out of.

Each section below ends with a check you can run right now, without calling anyone. Allow ten minutes for the lot.

Who owns your domain?

The question is not “who bought it” or “who pays for it”, but “in whose name is it registered”. Those are three different things, and only the last one counts.

A domain registered in an agency's name is leverage against you the day of a disagreement — and a problem with no solution the day that agency shuts down. Transferring a domain requires the holder's cooperation: without it you wait for expiry, hoping nobody else picks it up in the meantime.

The check: query a public whois service with your domain name. You will see the declared holder, the expiry date and the registrar. If the data is hidden behind a privacy service — common and legitimate — ask your vendor for a screenshot of the management panel showing the holder. A refusal is itself an answer.

If the answer is wrong: request the transfer in writing, calmly, while the relationship is good. It takes a few days and costs little. Waiting for a conflict multiplies the difficulty.

Renewal

A domain is rented, not bought. At expiry the mechanics are the same everywhere, and the cost rises at every stage.

• Before expiry — renewal costs the normal price.
• Grace period — a few weeks during which the site no longer responds but the domain is still recoverable at the ordinary rate. Your email, meanwhile, has already gone down.
• Redemption period — the domain is held back but recovering it becomes markedly more expensive.
• Back on sale — anyone can take it. Automated buyers permanently watch domains being released, particularly those still receiving visits.

The check: the expiry date is in the whois. Turn on auto-renewal, and above all confirm the card on file is still valid — that is the most frequent cause of accidental expiry. Check the domain's contact email too: if it is an address on that same domain, expiry warnings will arrive once the mailbox is already down.

Choosing an extension

A country extension (.fr, .tg, .be) says where you are established and reassures a local audience. A generic extension (.com) says nothing in particular, which is sometimes exactly what you want.

On search, the effect is small and often overstated: a country extension may help slightly on local queries, and will never compensate for a site with no content. The decisive criterion lies elsewhere: whether the extension is available for your name, and whether it matches what your customers will type spontaneously.

Reserving several extensions and redirecting them to the main one is a cheap precaution if your name is easily confused. It stops being useful beyond two or three.

Shared, virtual private server, or managed

Option	Suited to	The trade-off
Shared	Marketing site, blog, moderate traffic	You share the machine: speed depends on other sites' activity
Virtual private server	Business application, shop, specific needs	Guaranteed resources, but system administration is on you
Managed	Any organisation without in-house system skills	Dearer per line, but updates and monitoring are handled

The honest calculation is annual, not monthly, and it includes internal time. A cheap private server that eats half a day a month costs more than a managed offer twice its listed price.

The criteria that matter

Offers are almost always compared on disk space and traffic. Those are rarely the real constraints. Four criteria weigh more:

• Server location. It determines latency for your visitors, and the legal regime applying to your data — a point to settle explicitly if you process personal data of European residents.
• Backups included. Their frequency, their depth of history, and above all whether you can trigger a restore yourself or must open a ticket and wait.
• The stated support response time. Not the existence of support: the time, in writing, and what it covers outside business hours.
• The exit. Can you retrieve all your files and databases in a standard format, without their involvement? If not, you are renting your own data.

Taking back control when a former vendor holds the credentials

A frequent situation, and rarely hopeless. In order:

1. Ask in writing for the list of credentials and the domain transfer. A plain email, without reproach, is enough in most cases.
2. Identify the registrar through the whois. If your organisation is listed as holder, that registrar has a recovery procedure against proof of identity, independent of the vendor.
3. Rebuild what is missing rather than wait. A site can be copied and rehosted elsewhere; it is the domain and the email that genuinely block you, not the files.

Six checks to run this morning: domain holder, expiry date, valid payment method, a contact address independent of the domain, ownership of the hosting account, and your ability to export your data alone.

What we do on our side

Our clients hold their own domain and own their hosting account from day one, including when we administer everything. This site runs on a managed private server with daily backups and tested restores — the arrangement described in our article on backups.

The DevOps & Cloud page covers the infrastructure, and Web & Mobile Development what runs on it.