What's the best service to register a domain name?

[Hygro]

Ok ye bloggers, 4-hr workweekers, tech savvy or tech illiterate-but-can-use-the internet folks...


What is the best service to buy a domain name?
What is the best service to provide hosting?

How can I get the best service for the lowest price? I have a feeling it's not godaddy....

 

[Mise]

What's the domain for? You might be better off without one and just using a free blog service or other free service that gives you a subdomain.

For the domain name, just buy it from the absolute dirt cheapest place you can. It's like $6 per year or something, so it doesn't really matter. All they do is register it, then you give them the details of your preferred host and they point your domain at the host's servers.

For hosting, what are your needs?

 

[emzie]

The difference in price should only be like 5 dollars, regardless of where you register.

Boycott godaddy, please.

 

[Zelig]

namecheap.com for domain names
nearlyfreespeech.net for hosting

If you're hosting something that's going to be getting a lot of traffic regularly, you can do better than nearlyfreespeech, but for smallish sites, you won't find any better price.

 

[bhsup]

I love 1and1.com

Rock solid uptime is my experience with them. Had a brief glitch once with an exchange account, but that's about it.

 

[Hygro]

edit: had this page open so long didn't see vrwc's post
My concern is that if I blog with a name, and it goes anywhere, and I want the domain later, speculating robots will have bought the domain and will sell it for more.

Anyway, thanks to Zelig's site I just registered www.aristotlesrepublic.com

So the plan is, since my operation is small, to get at nearlyfreespeech. Will they run me through the steps of getting my ideas onto the internet or do I need to know some stuff before I can bridge my webhosting and my domain registry?

 

[amadeus]

Boycott godaddy, please.

Why? For the elephant?

Edit: Ah, I see. He was vacationing in Comrade Bob's territory.

Understood.

 

[Zelig]

nearlyfreespeech is not very point and click.

If you're reasonably savvy with software, installing something like wordpress should be pretty easy, there should be a ton of guides for installing it.

Check out the NFS FAQ - it's very good, and has a bit about usage for users new to web hosting.