fifeclub — Fri, 22 Feb 2002 16:25:49 +0000

I've been fine with them for a year and a half so far. I did have my site down for server problems for 3 full days once, but otherwise nothing major. It's at CharlotteMLB.com if you want to check out the end product. It's not 'unlimited', but 25megs is more than I need and I only use about 15% of my allotted monthly bandwidth. But I am sure that I definitely do own my own domain.

As for the $35, if that's on the more expensive side than I guess that's where they're making their profit. I'll still gladly pay it for that deal. You're right though, you never do know. Even if they keep their promise for as long as they're in business... well just look at Enron.

mjames — Fri, 22 Feb 2002 15:59:25 +0000

If it's too good to be true, it probably is.

Let me tell you, I went down the exact same road a few years ago when I first left Geocities/Tripod/the like. There was a company called ActFit.com that claimed to offer free "unlimited" hosting, but they would own your domain name. Being the naive newbie I was at the time, I followed the example of some of my friends who ran sports web sites, as well, and signed up with them. In fact, they used to own my current domain, sports-central.org.

As the ad market deteriorated, so did their service. Frequent downtimes, slow servers, and then came the ads. They managed to force all members to run a huge, ugly banner frame at the bottom of their sites. It was the equivalent to what NameZero does/did.

Well, I had had enough. I bought the domain (boy, that in itself was an adventure). I had to pay them something like $100 bucks just for the domain. I spent hours on the phone trying confirm with them that they'd actually give me my domain if I payed them that outrageous amount of hard-earned money. Sure enough, they transfered the ownership of the domain to me and it's been that way ever since.

Moral of the story? The service might seem good now, but you never know what the future holds.

P.S. $35 is nearly three times what I pay for domains. It isn't "average" by any means.

fifeclub — Fri, 22 Feb 2002 14:03:42 +0000

No. You own your domain and your website. They're just the registrar, meaning they keep your official domain registration info on file. For example, if you buy your domain name thru register.com and then go to a third-party to host your website, then register.com is still acting as your registrar. In other words, when you do a domain name search, it's register.com that is actually holding your registration information on file, telling other computers the IP address where your website can actually be found. I haven't got a clue as to how that's a benefit to a company to be a registrar but the bottom line is that whomever hosts your website (provides server space) is not always the same company that acts as your registrar.

If anyone else can explain it better, please do.

Busy — Fri, 22 Feb 2002 06:19:36 +0000

so they own the domain name?

mysql is a databse, like access etc