Domain and hosting, and the questions worth asking before you sign

This is the least interesting part of having a website and it causes the worst emergencies. Roughly a third of the companies we audit don’t control their own domain.

The ownership question

Your domain should be registered to your company, with billing going to an email address inside your company, and login credentials somebody there actually has.

What we usually find instead is a domain registered in the name of a vendor who built the site in 2014. Sometimes that vendor is contactable. Sometimes the company has closed. Recovering a domain from a closed company is possible and it’s a legal process measured in months.

Check today. Use ICANN Lookup, type in your domain, and see whose name comes up. For .in domains the registry is NIXI. It takes a minute.

.com or .in

If you sell internationally, .com. If you sell within India, either works and .in is often available when .com isn’t. It carries no ranking penalty inside India.

Buy both if the budget allows and point one at the other. Domains are cheap and the alternative is a competitor buying the one you skipped.

Avoid the exotic endings. A .company or .services address gets treated with suspicion by exactly the conservative buyers most established businesses want.

Hosting, and what actually matters

• Where the server is. A server in India serves Indian visitors faster than one in Arizona. It’s a real difference on a mobile connection.
• Backups. Ask how often, how far back, and how you restore. Get the answer in writing.
• SSL included. Should be free and automatic. Anybody charging separately for a basic certificate is charging for nothing.
• Who has root access. If it’s a server rather than shared hosting, somebody has full control of it. Know who.
• What happens at renewal. Introductory pricing that triples in year two is normal in this market. Ask for the renewal rate up front.

Static, WordPress, or something custom

For a brochure and catalogue site, static files are the fastest and cheapest to host, and there’s almost nothing to hack. That’s what we build unless there’s a reason not to.

WordPress makes sense when somebody genuinely publishes regularly and wants to do it themselves. It needs monthly patching. Unpatched WordPress is the single most common way Indian SME sites get compromised.

Custom applications make sense when there’s a real application. A dealer login, an ERP feed, live inventory. Not for a catalogue.

The handover document

Whoever builds your site should give you one handover document. It lists the domain registrar and login, the hosting provider and login, and where the DNS sits. It also covers the analytics account and any third party services. In your company’s name.

If a vendor won’t provide that, treat it as the warning it is.

Written by Sameer Gaikwad, founder of Buildgin. Thirty three years in electrical power systems across global MNCs, now applying the same condition monitoring habit to websites.