Domain Owl

I was browsing one of those sinister hosting forums today where everything in the domaining world seems for sale for just a few pennies. I was astonished to see requests for European hosting. These are the spaces where presumably offshore or foreign web host space is just pennies on the dollar. Evidently the small change hosting accounts can cost per month is still too much money to pay for some domainers.

There are so many problems with this it’s not even funny. Security problems aside, there is no way you can guarantee any members of your websites, let alone promise e-commerce customers any data integrity. Want to know a great way to get your identity stolen? Store a bunch of personal information and work product in “secure” servers in some unknowable foreign location. How many European data centers have you been to, anyway?

I was surprised to see people (users)  I know biting at these offers. Anyone who doesn’t see this catch-22 coming is crazy. How would you even read a Norwegian web hosting administration interface? What if the English versions bugs up? I have used foreign servers and they collapse and “forget everything” often. Do you know how to conduct a customer service call in Swedish?

I urge everyone to forgo the temptations of offshore webhosting and hidden assets. I urge every domainer to contract legitimate and single account direct payment hosting with an understood Terms of Service contract. With a reliable web hosting vendor. And I am pleading with any domainer who thinks web hosting can come at pennies and reliably earn Google revenues, there is always a catch. There is no free lunch.

If you have to lodge a service complaint, do you know who really owns the web hosting account? Because that is the only person responsible for the customer service end of what could be a very cheap reseller account. To take care of outages you will suddenly be dependent on that guy you traded a dozen bucks to one time last year for this hosting deal.

Are you willing to risk that? Just say no and walk away from dirt cheap (and probably just dirty) foreign servers flashing their wares online. Without legible guarantees and service contracts your home country can legitimize and enforce, you are flying blind without a parachute. And that is never going to make the fine people at Google or Commission Junction or Bing happy with you. Which is what you want.