Question is how important is your domain name to you. Normally these companies pull the domain name away and use a refresh tags or frames to deliver your site. This is bad and drops your listings on many of the search engines. Also depending on how they handle your domains mail could be routed through their mailservers, with millions of other people trying to get a cut price deal on a domain name. Thus you may end up with 2 years worth of slow/ irratic mail delivery, for an equivalent £20 per year saving.
Then there is the after sales service. Who do you contact what happens if something goes wrong? Who actually in control of your domain?
The question I normally ask people is this. At the end of the day is the small saving worth the hassle and potential problems that moving the domain can cause? The choice of course is yours to make.
i dont know what the right step to do is...or what it entails..or how it works!!!!!damn!..i wish i knew stuff!!!!!!!!!
If you want to transfer it *should* be a simple case of contacting your exsisting ISP and asking them to transfer the name to the new ISP.
As long as you have full access to your site files then I can't really see how transfering the name would lead to 'refresh tags or frames'.
They *might* have a point with the email but as long as you are sure the new ISP is realiable this shouldn't be a problem.
It's an obvious thing to say but like everything else when it comes to ISP's the cheapest is usually the cheapest for a reason..
your current domain registrar is quite right to tell you this. don't go hassling them for all the information as they won't be making much out of your domain registration (maybe only pennies) and if you cause them a lot of work, it'll be easier and cheaper for them to not tell you but to let you simply transfer away and suffer any consequences. it's your job to check terms and conditions, service levels, pricing etc for multiple companies.
take a look at a lot of domain registration company sites and their terms and conditions. look for a company that advertises an all inclusive price - 1p domains never cost just 1p. calculate costs over a 2 year period. check for restrictions or additional charges for domain name transfers / DNS control and so on. check service levels etc.
at the same time, try to learn about web hosting. if you have a domain name, you will want to use it with a web site, which needs hosting. will you be using free space provided by your ISP, or will you want to use "commercial" hosting with a full cgi bin, more webspace, ASP / PHP / MySQL or other features. when you know what sort of web hosting you need, then you'll know what services you need from a domain registration company.
it will take some time to investigate all this, but it will be worth it. you may not be able to save much money, but you can certainly save yourself a lot of hassle.
I would say no. If all you save is a couple of bucks a year and the company you would be taking it away from already does everything else for you and you're happy with them. Give them the extra couple of dollars and save yourself the hassle.
