Domain & Hosting Packages - Important info for Newbies

A little bit of advice for newbies;

Never buy and host your domains with the same company.

If you do this you risk your website being taken down if you have a payment dispute or they fuck up your account and you lose all control.

Also, when choosing hosting make sure that the provider's servers are located in the geographical location where you want to rank high on the search engines. For example 1&1 (The UK's biggest hosting provider) has servers located in Germany. If your TLD is a .com rather than .co.uk your site will be interpreted as being German based and you might do ok on Google.de but shit on Google.co.uk.

Hope this helps.

Sorry but I definitely have to disagree. First it really does not matter where you purchase your domain. It is more important to ensure the domain is registered in your name NOT in the name of your web host.

Many people who fall for the "Free Domain" marketing used by a number of hosts find their free domain is actually registered in the name of the web host.

If they ever plan to switch hosts it can be expensive to have control of the domain transferred. Some of these hosts charge double or triple the typical registration cost of $10 - $15 per year to transfer the registrant information to your name.

As to geographical information that is nothing but crap. Speaking from a web hosts perspective it really does not matter where your hosts servers are located. We have thousands of clients from around the world, and our servers are located in datacenters in Canada and the United States.

Many of our international clients do extremely well in their home countries despite the fact their site is hosted in the US. We have american clients hosted in our Canadian data center that dominate google's US serps for some extremely competitive search terms.

Basic SEO such as On-page optimization and backlinks are more important to obtaining good SERP results than where your sites servers are located.

I love a debate!

The first point I make about domain and hosting is that if your relationship breaks down with the hosting company for whatever reason they can take down your site and you can't access your control panel - Trust me this has happened to me when they tried to take a re-occurring fee from my credit card and my card had expired. I was unable to get a support ticket or my Support ID code located in the control panel. I was also unable to change the nameservers to point to my new hosting company. It took about three wekks to sort out and I lost money during the down time.

I would love to hear other peoples views on the location of servers - this information was highlighted in David Viney 'The SEO Expert' author of 'Get to the top on Google'. He could be wrong of course.

Basicly I disagree with your claims..i hosted my site using bluehost..the server located in the US..but still my site on #4 and #5 spot on the keyword i target in my country

so,to make it short..locations is not an issue..there are a lot of factor tho..eg;i've been reading here that claims that if u wanna rank high in the uk..u should get as much as .co.uk backlinks not .de and i'm totally agree with that..

well,let's wait and see what other bhw members will say here..anyway,this is a good thread to be discuss here..

it's 2 a.m already here in my place..i need to sleep..astalavista..nite my friend

MisterTwister said:

I love a debate!

The first point I make about domain and hosting is that if your relationship breaks down with the hosting company for whatever reason they can take down your site and you can't access your control panel - Trust me this has happened to me when they tried to take a re-occurring fee from my credit card and my card had expired. I was unable to get a support ticket or my Support ID code located in the control panel. I was also unable to change the nameservers to point to my new hosting company. It took about three wekks to sort out and I lost money during the down time.

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That does suck! Obviously you were with the wrong host. I hear horror stories all the time about hosts that are quick to suspend but are lousy with support.

For a host, expiring credit cards are a fact of life and non payments as result should be handled differently.

As for the domain, if you register a domain with your host you should always
have a way to update it. Many hosts are just resellers for the large registrars. If your host tries to screw you over complain to the registrar.
You will be surprised how quickly things get resolved.

Regarding geo targeting

I have just done a bit of research on this and it confirms that server location is very important if using .com in a non us country.

There is however a workaround provided by google.
"Over the last few years, website owners have been facing issues while specifying targeted geo location of their website. They have been previously relying on I.P address of web hosting or using country specific domains. This feature will help website owners to specify their target geographical location for their website, or sub-domains.

Suppose, your business is based in Netherlands, but your website is hosted in US. This could result in seo ranking issues, since your website will score higher rankings within Google.com (US), rather than Google.nl (Netherlands)."

From google:

"If your site targets users in a particular location, you can provide us with information that will help determine how your site appears in our country-specific search results, and also improve our search results for geographic queries. You can only use this feature for sites with a neutral top-level domain, such as .com or .org. Country-specific domains, such as .ie or .fr, are already associated with a country or region."

Does anyone else have a view on this as I think it would be helpful to other BHW members?