7 things you MUST know before registering a domain

7 things you MUST know before registering a domain

Transfer-out fees

Buried in the fine print of a registrars' "Terms of Service" will be a hidden fee authorizing them to charge your credit card a "transfer-out" fee if you move your domain to another registrar. Often times, this transfer-out fee is 2 or 3 times the cost of the original registration. This practice violates the ICANN policy on domain transfers. In most cases if this happens to you a simple call to your credit card company will have the charge reversed, if you notice. Registrars who use this practice play the numbers game as many will not.

We do NOT charge any transfer-out fee. Click here to transfer your domain to us and to get one year renewal.

Pay-as-you-go

This is where you make a multi-year interest-free loan to the registrar. It works like this: You register a domain with them for example, 5 years (perhaps to obtain a discounted rate), you expect your domain name to be registered for 5 years. Think again, some registrars will pay the registry for 1 year and pocket the rest of your money.

Then for the rest of your five year term they'll renew each year for one year. Usually this is coupled with a strict "no-refunds" policy, so an odd situation occurs: they stand to make more money from your original registration if they lose you as a customer before your full 5 years are up, so providing poor service to the point where you leave actually adds to their bottom line.

You can use a Free WHOIS lookup tool to verify the real expiration date for your domain. It should match up with the number of years you paid your registrar for.

We register the domain as many years as per your request right away. You will be able to see the same in the WHOIS database with-in 24 hours of the registration.

WHOIS Edit Fees and Locks

Every time you register a domain name, the details of that domain registration must be published in a publicly accessible database called WHOIS.

One of the functions a registrar is supposed to be providing to you is the ability to change those WHOIS records. Some registrars (especially the bargain basement outfits) register your domain for a dirt-cheap price and then ding you with an "administration fee" when you want to edit your WHOIS record. Some others may also "lockdown" your domain for 60 days every time you make an edit to your record, preventing you from moving the name out to another registrar.

You will get the control panel and you are free to change WHOIS information as many times as you wish. We provide a locking mechanism for you in the control panel and we strongly suggest you to lock your domain as soon as you make changes. When you want to change WHOIS info, unlock the domain, do the changes as desired and lock it immediately to prevent any unauthorized transfers. Register your domain now.

Premium WHOIS Privacy Services

Because your domain record is public for all to see, some registrars want to upsell you to "privacy services" or "WHOIS masking", "private registration", where they put their own info in the WHOIS record instead of yours.

The important thing to know here is that in the eyes of the domain Registry to which all the Registrars interact, and the Registry's oversight body (like ICANN, or in Canada, CIRA), whoever is listed in the domain WHOIS record as the domain Registrant is the legal owner of the domain name. Keep that in mind, if you use a service like this, they own the domain, not you, not withstanding whatever contract or Terms of Service you enter into with them to "own" this name on your behalf. If it lands in a dispute proceeding it will be an open and shut case: they own the name.

Taking it one step further, some "privacy" services will get you to sign up for the WHOIS privacy service and then they turn around and happily offer to sell your true data to anybody else who cares to pay for it.

We do NOT offer WHOIS privacy services. We do not want clients who want to hide themselves by not publishing their identity in WHOIS database.

Registrar-lock

There has historically been a real problem with "domain slamming" (see above) and unauthorized domain transfers, so the "registrar-lock" was created to protect a domain against this. If the registrar lock is set, nobody can transfer your domain away from you. This is actually a good thing and best practices include having this set for all your domains. The sharper registrars enable it by default when they register or transfer a domain for you. Alas, this lock can become a real problem for you if it is turned on and the registrar will not turn it off, or give you the ability to turn it on or off yourself.

Our control panel allows you to lock and unlock your domain and we strongly suggest to lock your domain as soon as you do any changes. We, ourself do not lock your domain.

Domain Auth-code

Some of the Top-Level-Domains (TLDs) run on a protocol called "EPP" and to further guard against unauthorized transfers, a domain must have an 8-character auth-code supplied before it will transfer. Current examples are .BIZ, .INFO and .ORG. The current or "losing" registrar holds this code. You need it if you want to move your domain away. Hopefully they will give it to you.

Your control panel lists the AUTH-CODE and is available for you all the time without even contacting us.

Domain Parking

You may not know this, but domain parking is big business. You know, when you click on a link somewhere or make a typo entering a web address and you wind up on some crapola "search page" optionally throwing up a million pop-up ads? That is a parked domain and the larger players can park thousands of domains and make literally millions of dollars "monetizing" them via domain parking.

You know who has access to thousands of domains? Domain registrars. Some of them offer domain registrations at rock bottom prices just so they can monetize the parked names. This may not bother you, but some people don't realize they're paying for something their registrar then uses to generate more revenue for themselves.

At the time of registration and also in the control panel, you can specify the name server that you want. It defaults to our name server if you do not specify any and shows "Under Construction" page until you host your website or change the name server. We do not display any advertisements to make money from it, we just display our own logo and list our services.

Why register a domain with HamaraShehar?

Why register a domain with HamaraShehar?

Expertise

Fortunately, unlike competition whose companies are run by non-technical persons, our company is owned and run by a technical expert, who taught students around the world in 1996 itself when the Internet was infancy stage and makes sure that our service excels technically even compared with the Top 5 IT Companies by revenue. We are proud to serve over 3,000 clients all over the world since year 2000 and survie the dot com bubble burst. We are pleased to have 98% client retention and get most of the business by referrals by existing clients. We've designed over 160,000 pages (many are database driven dynamic websites), over 2,500 panoramic views for wide variety of business segments.

Lowest Cost of Getting Online Presense & More Value Added Services

Our fee to bring your business online is lowest globally, when you consider the features and service quality. We include more services and value added features in our standard fee which otherwise costs more than double the fee that we charge. We are able to do so because we've setup and follow a structured procedures of designing, developing a website. On the surface, the developed website may look same, but the underlying code differs a lot, which effects your website maintenance, search engine ranking, download speed, etc. Assuming that a typical business owner may not have technical knowledge of websites, please consider the following few simple examples how we differ from competition.

	We do NOT use any depreciated HTML code
	We do NOT use any embedded font tags. We use style sheets and separate content and presentation for easier maintenance and faster web page download
	Each and every web page is optimized to download fast. We remove all unwanted code and empty space from each page. Click here to see the difference of this page
	We use appropriate heading HTML tags for page and sub-headings on each page, where as the competition just makes the text bold. Even though it may look same, for search engines, our page gives more value since it knows what are headings and keywords in those headings
	We consolidate all javascript and other components and separate it from the web page so that it would be cached by the browser and downloads fast and also saves you a lot on the bandwidth cost
	Every page is named and titled appropriately. We do NOT keep same title for all pages. We do NOT stuff titles with repeated keywords
	Each and every image/picture is captioned for the search engines. To check this, just move the mouse over any non-flash image on this page and you will see the caption in a yellow rectangle right below the mouse pointer
	Unlike others, we publish your email on your 'Contact Us' page in such a way that robots can not grab your email address and send SPAM
	The 'Contact Us' page and other forms that we develop robots submitting the form with SPAM

Bye-Bye Templates, Customized Solutions, Always

We know your business is unique and we will make sure your website is unique as well. We do not believe in pre-made template based websites. Each business is different so is their website. Our services are personalized to meet your requirements to the best possible fit. We go extra mile to make sure we design & develop solutions in the right way. We use professional tools as well as in-house developed tools to help us in delivering solutions quickly as well as to verify the results of each stage meets strict in-house quality standards.

Business Ethics, Honesty, Technical Expertise, Strategy Guidance and zero Fine Print

As a customer, when we take services from other companies, we do not want to see any fine print. Then, how our customers are different than that? Absolutely, no fine print and everything is communicated in black & white up front. We believe in only one thing, money can be earned by different ways sooner or later. But, trust once lost, can not be won from the same client. Business Ethics, Honesty, Technical Expertise, Advising Clients about their online strategy as if their business is our own business are four pillars of our organization.

Small Business Owner & Management

We've a large technical team and project managers. In addition to the project managers, owner - an expert in web technologies who personally developed and conducted online courses in 1996 itself - also monitors all projects to make sure they are delivered as per client expectation with highest quality & web standards.

Why you need a Domain/Website Name Registered

Why you need a Domain/Website Name Registered

Not having your own domain name will create the following perception in the minds of most people:

	Probably new
	Definitely small
	Maybe part time
	Probably not a real company

A strong possibility of being a "shady operator" Having your own domain does not lead people to automatically trust you. However, with this small step you will successfully alter their perception of you to:

	Probably established
	Could be large or small
	Full time
	Probably a real company
	Being a "shady operator" not impossible

Can you see the potential in the differences?

Another important point of course is branding. You want your name to become known and familiar. Something that people can remember easily. Something they will associate with what you do. That's a tall order if you don't have your own name to begin with. With your own domain name, plus the right words and correct image, your task of creating trust is that much easier.

With the cost of new domain names now cheaper than ever, you really have no excuse for not obtaining your own. The small fee that you pay per year for your own domain name is peanuts compared to the benefits that you get.

Our company is a big & reputable one. Every one knows it, I don't need a website.

If your company is big and/or reputable, then people expect you to have a website before any other company else. If not, people think "what is wrong with this company? They don't even have a website?". Do you know any big and/or reputable company with no telephone? I'm sure you don't. These days, website became as important as a telephone. For example, every one of us know about Maruti car. Isn't? Just because every one knows about Toyota, Toyota did not stop there. They've their own website

I published my website on a free hosting service. Why should I've my own website name?

If you put up your website with one of the free web hosting services, the only company who benefits is the web hosting company, NOT you. The last person who benefits is you. There are many reasons why having your own website name is a must:

1. When you have your own website name, the address of your website will be of the form http://YourCompany.com. On the other hand, if you put up your website on one of the free servers, the address of your website will be something like: http://SomeFreeWebsite.com/YourWebSite/. Which of these two sounds more professional? Which of these two is smaller and is hence easier to remember? Note that, every person who access web knows that it is a free hosting company and you published your reputable company information on the FREE hosting servers and you don't have your own. Compare this with "Having your own telephone number for your company versus giving a PP telephone of your neighbor shop." PP number clearly tells that you don't have your own telephone number and a small company.
2. Just imagine having to change host for your website. All the work of promoting of your URL goes into the trash! Sure you might be able to set up a redirect for a month or so, but ultimately you'd have to do all your previous promotion all over again from scratch.
3. Imagine, the FREE hosting service closed their service similar to Hyderabad.com! Immediately every single link to your website from anywhere in the universe is broken! All search engine and directory listings would be useless to you! You will loose all of your visitors. Frightening, isn't it? As a website name is simply a pointer to an address, having your own website name means you can change hosts at any time. Your website name remains the same, only the address of the server it points to changes. Compare this moving to a new home and keeping the same telephone number. No loss of visitors, no wasted promotion!
4. I'm not established now, I'll register my website name for my company later. Don't put it off until you're more established. If you wait for to become reasonably popular before deciding to register your name, you will probably find you're too late. Someone else will have already taken the name! Then what will you do? There is a rumour that one of our most popular Telugu newspaper paid about one crore rupees to get their website name, because some one else registered that name long before. Remember that there are more than 3.5 crore websites registered and thousands of websites are registered every single day.
5. Build credibility: The only way to make money online is to build up credibility among your customers. Having your own website name is the first step in doing that. Your customers will feel more comfortable buying whatever it is that you are selling if you have your own website name. It makes your customers feel that they are dealing with a large, established company, rather than with some fly-by-night operator. Click here to build credibility by registering a domain for your business now
6. When you have your own website name, you can have multiple emails of the form name@YourCompany.com. This allows you to assign different emails to different functions. For example, for questions on products & services that you sell, you can direct your visitors to sales@YourCompany.com. For comments/ suggestions about your website, you can direct them to feedback@YourCompany.com. Having different email addresses for different functions not only makes it easier for you to filter your email using your email client program such as Outlook Express etc., but also gives your customers the impression that yours is a large, established company with whom it is safe to do business.
7. Many search engines give a lot of emphasis to the home page of a particular website, i.e. other things remaining the same, a home page of a website will often rank higher for a particular keyword than any other page. When you use some of the free hosting services, your index.html page is the home page of your website, but not of that your free hosting website. Hence in these search engines, your website will find it very difficult to make it to the top 20 or top 30, let alone the top 10 for some of the really competitive keywords. Just think of the amount of traffic that you will lose if this happens. In case you don't know what a search engine is, it is something like a 197 directory information or enquiry counter, where you ask for information. Search engines index websites and keep all that information handy. When you want to find out which website has the information you're looking for, you go to search engine such as Google.com and it tells you all the websites that have the information you're looking for.
8. Some search engines are now refusing to spider the websites which are hosted by the free web hosts. For instance, if you have a website hosted by the free web hosts, you would, until recently, have got the infamous error message saying that too many pages have been submitted from your website if you tried to submit your website to search engine AltaVista. While Altavista now says that "your URL has been submitted for processing" if you try to submit your website, rest assured that it will not spider any website belonging to many of the free web hosts even though it says that your website has been accepted. Can you afford that?
9. When your website is hosted by some of the free web hosts, you will find it very difficult to get it listed in a major directory like Yahoo.com. Although Yahoo.com will never admit that it won't add a commercial site which is hosted by one of the free web hosts, in practice, it will be a miracle if you can get your website listed by Yahoo.com. Listing your website with Yahoo.com is difficult enough even when you have your own website. Don't make your task more difficult than what it needs to be.