I’ve always had my many domain name registrations at a different company to the one hosting the corresponding websites.
I’ve always had my many domain name registrations at a different company to the ones hosting the corresponding websites. I think it’s just been a habit, but it’s always felt safer too. So I was pleased to read in The Security Risk of Combining Domain Registration and Web Hosting on the Bill Harzer blog that there are indeed good reasons to do so.
The author says: “Keeping your domain registration and web hosting with separate companies adds a critical layer of protection. If your web hosting account is hacked, your domain remains safe and inaccessible to the attacker. This separation provides a quick recovery path: you can back up your site, switch to a new hosting provider, and update your domain’s DNS settings to point to the new server. In most cases, your site can be back online in under an hour.”
The additional effort of paying separate organisations for domain registrations and website hosting is hardly taxing. Keeping registrations separate makes it very easy to move to a new host for cost or functionality reasons, something I’ve done often. But conversely, if there’s ever a reason to want to change the registrar, keeping them separate should make that simple too.