Pictured above: Lee French, Director of iSEV
A couple of obvious factors come into play when picking a web
hosting provider for your business. Firstly there's price, even
though domain names on the whole are pretty cost-effective these
days - a .co.uk address costs around £3 a year, while the
price for a .com domain is in the region of £15. Then there's
the actual package you'll receive from your provider - the amount
of web space, the speed, security and reliability of service, the
bandwidth on offer, and the technical support available, all spring
to mind.
But there's a third, and often ignored, aspect to bear in mind.
How easy will it be for you to transfer your domain to another host
should you ever wish to move on? Failing to address this issue at
the outset could lead to extra costs, not to mention wasted time
and a loss of productivity in the future.
Some of the more unscrupulous hosting providers, and sadly there
are a few of those out there, will do all they can to put as many
obstacles in your way to make the transfer process as difficult as
possible. They'll claim it's a time-consuming and complex
procedure. They'll tell you scare stories about your websites going
offline during the transition between providers. And even if you
finally decide to move your domain, they'll hit you with a transfer
fee of £15 or more to cover their 'admin fees'.
In reality though, switching domain names is a relatively cheap
and painless process. For example, to transfer a website with a
.co.uk address - a country code top-level domain (ccTLD) - to us at
iSEV simply requires the IPS TAG to be changed to our tag,
iSEV-LTD. This would take us all of 10 seconds to do, and yet some
providers will charge you £15 for this privilege!
With generic top-level domains (GTLDs) like .com, .net or .org,
there are a few additional steps that need to be taken, such as
making sure the domain is unlocked for transfer and that the
administrative contact email is valid, but again, this isn't a
difficult or protracted course of action. Switching GTLDs does also
include a requirement to renew the domain for an extra year, but
this would be the standard fee for one year's domain registration
and would, of course, be charged by the new provider, not the host
you are switching from.
As a company, we believe in being as transparent as possible
about our domain and hosting costs so our customers know precisely
what they'll be paying. And while domain transfers do require a
small amount of administrative work on our behalf to process, we
make sure these costs are included as part of any domain
registration fee we charge.
By being open and honest about this, we feel our customers are
fully informed about what they will get for their money, and more
importantly, they won't be hit with any unexpected extra charges
further down the line.
iSEV is a dedicated design, online marketing and internet
solutions company whose team has over 25 years experience of
creating innovative solutions to exactly meet customers' needs.