Do you know the true cost of your web domain?
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.
For more information please visit www.isev.co.uk.
