Web Hosting

Diversify to keep your domains safe

March 31, 2011

A friend asked recently about whether it would be a good idea to move their company domain to the same discount hosting they use for their personal website. My reply was that it was fine to move the hosting of the website but that it was a bad idea to move the domain registration to the same place that hosted the site.

"Can we leave the domain registration at the registrar and still move the hosting? And why is it bad to move the domain registration to the hosting company?" was the response.

The bottom line is you should never, ever, absolutely never, have your domain hosted with the same company that is the registrar for your domain. If you have this today go change it now and then come back to read why you got lucky.

Two centuries ago when the revolutionaries were making themselves into founding fathers of the United States they had the concept that one should keep power and responsibility divided amongst different branches of government. This serves several purposes including making sure that one bad apple doesn't ruin the batch. Even a collection of bad apples need to get the consent of plenty of other actors before they can ruin the batch.

Dreamhost earns mixed reviews

October 13, 2006

Back in July I looked at moving web hosts to Dreamhost as they got high marks on several Drupal related boards. Indeed they have a lot of great ideas. Ultimately two problems caused me to invoke the 97-day money-back guarantee.

The first problem reared it's head as I started to transition domains to Dreamhost. If one has a "fully hosted" domain with Dreamhost they presume that you will have your "www." name pointed to their www server. Therefore it's not possible to have their DNS setup without having www.example.com pointed at their server. This makes for tough going when one wants to test and transition.

Fatally, however, the email system for IMAP was terribly unreliable. Time after time it would ask for my password when it had just been given. Perhaps it's a client issue or a conflict between the client and server but whatever the root cause it proved fatal for their hosting. It does seem that POP clients worked reasonably well.

Dreamhost's MySQL, PHP and therefore Drupal support earn high marks. It would be great if they'd add it as a goodie to install in their hosting control but it works pretty well otherwise.

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