Hosting and domains

Why is it that some web design and hosting companies will not let their customers use a domain name they purchased from another company - even though the customer hasn't built a site yet?

Should that cause any red flags for customers in such a situation?

Thanks!

Never heard of the like issues, as hosting companies would lose lots of their clients, why should they?

I ve also never heard befor about such issues
normally you may register domain name anywhere you want and come to your web hosting
provider with your existing domain name. What you will have to do is just change
name servers to the ones of your hosting provider on the domain name registration
control panel provided to you by domain regisrar. And thats all

Hiya Preston

This definately sounds nuts, and I can only imagine that the design companies want total control over the customer preventing them going elsewhere, or so that they might configure the DNS in such a way so as not to reveal that they are only resellers when they might actually be trying to look like a big company?

(Although it is pretty easy to find out who they really are)

We have had several customers of ours want to transfer their names to us and other companies have really given them a hard time over releasing their names, and in some case's customers have had to go directly to nominet to over rule the host or design guy.

Its one thing to enquire as to why a customer might want to go elsewhere (kinda helps learn if you could be doing something more) but to demand to control a customers domain name or not take on the business will just put them at a loss, and is possibly worth avoiding.

We've also discovered that companies that do this dont give the customer any method of controlling their domain names too, so thats something that should be asked before transferring a domain name to any company.

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Cpanelv11 / CDP / PHP5 / MySQL5
WESH UK Web Hosting :: 0845 257 1084

I'm only a small company and I'm not ashamed to admit that, but I agree with Wesh-UK that it should cause a red flag and I'd advise against companies that hold onto their customers domains.

The best thing to do is purchase a domain elsewhere from places like Godaddy, or Namesco, then simply change the nameservers to their ones. That way, you have control over your domain and they can't force you into staying with them if you don't want to

Thanks Whym

Thats not to say its a bad thing though to transfer your domain name to your hosting company. We have tons of customers who actually want us to be their registrar so they can everything in 1 place, and some purely because they have no idea what a nameserver is and want us to look after it for them.

I think the best thing to do in any case would be to telephone a company and ask if the customer "must" have the name registered through the host, and if they did, find out if there is any cost involved if they wanted to transfer it away later.

The other thing that nobody seems to do is "Read the smallprint" (Or in our case normal print)

__________________
Cpanelv11 / CDP / PHP5 / MySQL5
WESH UK Web Hosting :: 0845 257 1084