Please advise: domain name/web hosting

[The Grim Ninja]

I have a domain registered with Registerfly, Dreamhost, and Yahoo! Domains.

They all work.



The latest domain name I got, I registered via Yahoo on Wednesday. Less than 2 hours later, it was mine, the servers were updated, and the site was hosted on my Dreamhost account. That is pretty fast in my book.

Yahoo! Domains are $2 for your first registration. Add $10 if you want privacy added (So your name/address/phone isn't associated with the domain lookup information).


As you may have guessed, I host with Dreamhost. They're not the best in terms of uptime, but they have PLENTY of room to grow in terms of storage and monthly transfer. Plus, they're pretty cheap.

http://dreamhost.com/shared/comparison.html

If you're interested in Dreamhost, and would be willing to put me down as your referral, let me know.

[ho'ard]

Regarding "catchall".
With domain ownership only, you can control how mail to that domain is routed.
Let's say you bought www.snap.info.
You would be able to set up a "rule" in the domain service's interface that said mail to prym@snap.info would bounce to (for example) prymrealaddy@comcast.net.

So you could tell your friends to remember prym@snap.info as your "forever" address. You could change ISPs every month and just point it towards whatever "main" e-mail account you happen to be using that week. You would never miss a message sent to prym@snap.info again.

Where the catchall comes in-- you can set up an "anything else" rule as well, so that you could tell one person to e-mail you at sales@snap.info, another to e-mail you at Puppiesaregreat@snap.info, another to e-mail you at "president@snap.info, and another to e-mail you at Ilovebondage@snap.info. You would receive all of them bounced to your "main" e-mail account. Obviously the catchall has more potential to collect spam, so if spam bothers you it's not such a good idea.
The downside of having a referring addy is that some listservs might be finicky about the arrangement (I never have quite wrapped my brain around that one)
and your friends will likely see responses coming from a different addy unless you're vigilant about setting your "from" addy to prym@snap.info.


Not to compete with the others here but both fastmail and bargainvault have great uptime.
DirectNIC is in New Orleans, and considering all they've been through it's amazing I didn't have any real interruption.

[Baby Tats]

A little bit more on catchall mail. Catchall and being able to blackhole mail are one of the best tools you can use to stop and track spam. I have been doing this for several years. To me, it is worth registering a domain name just for this purpose alone.

h' explained it well. Basically, you can hand out unique email addresses whenever you want to. For example when ordering from Amazon, you use amazon.com@yourdomain.com but for personal emails you can use yourname@yourdomain.com. It doesn't matter what you put in front of @yourdomain.com, all email sent to the domain will be caught and sent to whatever address you specify. If an address starts to receive spam you: 1)know immediately who leaked that email address to spammers and 2)can "blackhole" all email that comes to that address in the future. There are also some addresses that will receive spam automatically once your domain name gets known to the spammers. It is best to just start off "blackholeing" these addresses from the beginning and never giving them out to anyone. For example:

sales@yourdomain.com
info@yourdomain.com
contact@yourdomain.com
webmaster@yourdomain.com

Plus, you can take this domain name with you for the rest of your life. It's a nice feature to have so make sure the control panel you get with your web hosting supports it.


BT

[prymsnap]

Baby Tats -- brilliant!

Thanks.