Daily Domain Name Registration Blog

I have a lot of sympathy for those who’ve been messed about by their domain registrar, hosting company, ISP or other service provider. It can be unbelievably frustrating, especially when call centres are outsourced or you can’t even get to speak to a real person.

However, I think you can reduce your risk of suffering from this sort of issue by performing a few quick tests before you sign on the dotted line.

Make sure you know what you want. Before you start testing companies, make a list of your requirements. What do you need, how much can you afford to spend, and what is your level of technical knowledge? Shortlist companies which seem to fit your needs, and then start checking them out.

Check the forums. It takes ten minutes or so to have a quick poke about on an appropriate forum to make sure there aren’t more than the usual number of Stories of Doom about the company to whom you’re thinking of handing over your cash. Bear in mind that no company has all happy customers, and the unhappy ones are the most likely to complain; but nevertheless you can get a general idea of the quality of a company by looking at customer reviews. Especially telling is if you spot the same problem coming up over and over again (poor customer service, hidden charges, etc. See the following forums as starting points:

• DNForum for domain registrars.
• Web Hosting Talk for hosting companies.
• ISP Review Forum for ISPs.

Blogs can also be good places to look for comments. Try typing “[company name] review” into a search engine and see what you find. Again, bear in mind that individuals may have negative experiences which skew the overall picture of a company’s performance; be realistic.

Send an email to the support department. Make sure you get the right department at this point; sales will be only too happy to help, but you need to ensure that the support for existing customers is just as efficient and helpful. If the email address for support is difficult to find, this may count against them!

• Ask a technical question as if you are an existing customer. Look at the quality of the response. Does it answer your question? Does it use jargon you don’t understand? Do they offer you further assistance, and is the tone of the email helpful and courteous?
• Monitor how long it takes for a response to be sent. If you foresee needing rapid email assistance, take this into account. You should send all your emails out at the same time of day (bear time zones in mind), and if they claim to offer “24-hour support”, you might want to try sending them at an awkward time, such as at 3am on a Saturday morning.

Call them up. If you think it’s likely you’re going to need telephone support (and you probably will, at some point, particularly with ISPs), you should call the company and see how long it takes for you to get to speak to a real person. Again, act as an existing customer, and ask a technical question.

Read all the small print. Before you decide to use a registrar, hosting company or ISP, make sure that you are fully informed of all fair usage policies, terms of service, fees and charges, offer expiries and other matters. Check for how long you will be required to stay with the company, and whether you can pay monthly.

• ISPs:
  • If an ISP offers “unlimited” downloads, find out what that means. It almost certainly doesn’t mean “unlimited”; instead, there will be a “fair usage policy” of some sort which will probably involve a downloading cap. Try to find out what this cap is if you think you might download more than about 40GB/month.
  • Check whether the ISP you are considering censors content in any way.
• Domain Registrars:
  • How easy will it be for you to transfer your domains away if you decide you are not happy with the registrar’s service? Try to find companies which offer free transfers (bearing in mind the compulsory registry-imposed fees for transfer of some TLDs).
• Hosting:
  • Again, be suspicious of “unlimited” bandwidth offers. Check what the actual cap is on data transfer.
  • Check how you will be able to claim on the host’s uptime guarantee, and to what situations it applies.

If you are careful, you shouldn’t have to deal with any hassle. A bit of research beforehand can make a world of difference to the ease with which you end up managing your domains, hosting or internet connection.

Resources:

Broadband internet package comparison from About-Broadband.co.uk.

Hosting comparisons from Web Hosting Reviewz.

Natalie Catchpole on testing web hosts.