Hosting can be sub-divided into Domain Hosting, Web Hosting and Email Hosting. These are the three main hosting that client usually are looking at. But service provider have to understand that, not all clients are tech-savvy or rather I should say not all of them are familiar with those terms, to them hosting means “My website appears on the Internet all around the world and I can have my own personalized email like me@mypreferreddomain.com”
Their thinking is not entirely wrong. Let’s see those different categories. Domain name hosting, simply means you get a URL / web address with you preferred name that practically mostly ends with the dot com (.com), like AdrianCJY.com. You can only hold a domain name where is chargeable around RM 35 – RM 55 for registration fee. Having a domain name doesn’t necessarily entitle you to get a web hosting. In other words, you got the name but not the storage for your website. Holding a domain name, you can simply just redirect users to the destination page, example AdrianCJY.my (domain name hosting only) will redirect users to http://www.Facebook.com/AdrianCJYsite, this is known as Web Forward, or you can do it by creating CName in the DNS Manager.
Next, we look into web hosting. In layman term, this simply means the storage. Basically, to let your first page to appear when users entered www.AdrianCJY.com, it needs to be named as “index” followed by their extension like “.htm”, “.html”, “.php”, “.aspx” and so on. To have web hosting, it is a must to have a domain name. Think this way, where are the users gonna go if you have the index page and not pointing / resolving to any URL ? Usually, when we entered a website by typing the URL – www.AdrianCJY.com, it is resolved to a server IP where you are not seeing it. Instead of remembering the long IP address, we just use a text-based URL. This is done in the DNS Manager – A Records section.
Third, we talk about email hosting. Normally, when you signed up to your hosting provider, email hosting are bundled up, which means it’s free to create unlimited email accounts under the particular domain like I mentioned earlier – me@mypreferreddomain.com. Well, you should not decide just to go for this hosting because they are free and allow you to create unlimited accounts, you have to look at their server uptime. An ideal hosting uptime will be 99.9% and currently providers on the top of the list are 1.com.my, JustSimple and Jaring. These benchmark records are very important to ensure uninterrupted email services. A tip for you, Google claimed to guarantee 100% uptime which is true so far we hosted under them via Google Apps for AdrianCJY.com. So basically, you can modify your email hosting whether to use the mail server from your provider or free 100% uptime mail server like the Google’s one, this is done in the DNS Manager – MX Records.
Well, after a long explanation, let me summarize it :
1. You can just hold a domain name and not using web hosting or email hosting services.
2. To use web hosting / email hosting services, you MUST have a domain name.
Customers are always given access to the control panel, which is way way overloaded with extra feature for them to fiddle around, example the famous cPanel, Parallels Plesk Panel and so on. They are given access to modify all sorts of DNS which some of them just got messed up and ended up the website they wanted to cannot appear on their URL, this might be caused by the wrong input of Name Servers (NS). Just to share my experience, we at 1.com.my, we set up everything correctly and provided users with 2 essential information, FTP Access and a simple control panel access which allow them to change platforms (Linux or Windows) and creating databases. Email hosting are not bundled up and you can call it expensive which is RM 99 per year. You have to look at this price in such way that they provide you 99.996% up time (updated as of October 2010) and they provide all the support for you, do not have to mingle around with those Mail Servers (MX Records).
Why do I say choosing the right hosting is important, best example I encountered via my client / friend was when this web hosting company called – Shinjiru Web Hosting based in Malaysia, launched a Facebook contest by letting users to upload a Cloud Hosting image of their company, get at least 10 LIKES, and you will be given a free cloud hosting. Like I mentioned earlier, to host your website, you have to have a domain name. Many users just took the price of the campaign in a way that : “IF YOU WIN, YOU WILL GET A PERSONALIZED DOMAIN NAME AND GET HOSTED A WEB FOR FREE”. Come on!! They will just give you everything except hosting which is useless.. It’s not stated in the contest clearly. People with no IT-background cannot interpret what is CLOUD HOSTING.
This is not entirely correct, and this is categorized as one of the business tactic to get customer promoting for them for free.. They just used Facebook as a platform to attract people posting about their latest product, more like a free marketing tool. She received few emails :
Email 1 : Congratulations, you have won Shinjiru Cloud Hosting
Email 2 : PLESK Control Panel account has been activated
Email 3 : Setup DNS as per instructed
Email 4 : Please provide payment details to register your domain name at RM 38 per year
Well, that reveals the truth. To make sure I didn’t misinterpret the email 4, I submitted a support ticket and here’s the reply. She can’t even write proper English.
Hi,
For domain xxx.com are not registered. We FREE the cloud hosting for 1st year, domain are not included.
We can registered the domain for you, pls let me know and i will raise an invoice.For .com domain registration are RM 38 yearly.
Thanks!
Regards,
Lili.C
Shinjiru Web Hosting provides poor customer service, claiming to be 24/7 online support and this is what I found out on their Live Chat at 2.00 AM when no one is there to attend me. Several minutes after I submitted a support ticket, the server was down – INTERNAL SERVER ERROR.
Unable to check ticket status at 2.15 AM due to server down
Online Support claimed to be 24/7 was offline
So think wisely before choosing your hosting service provider. And think twice too, before entering any Facebook contest, they are just playing with words in the ads to make customer with no-IT background confuse and eventually helped them to market their product FOC. Shinjiru, I am very disappointed of you. What is free web hosting without a DOMAIN for ?? This is just like you have a huge piece of hard disc, you partitioned it and give it to me for free, and I don’t see the point of doing that.
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Hi Adrian,
After reading through your post, we believe that there are some serious misunderstanding of our 101010 cloud hosting campaign with our participants as you have highlighted. We would never intentionally use our fans as a marketing tool to create free publicity and definitely not take the opportunity to try and upsell domain names that would costs less than RM40.00 to the participants for this campaign.
Looking back at our Facebook campaign, we didn’t mention anything about giving free domains as part of the free cloud hosting plan we are offering. I believe it’s only during the initial setup of the free account when we request for an active domain from our participants that we recommend those who doesn’t have a domain to sign up for one.
We also specifically highlight to these clients that we could register a free domain name by the extension of .co.cc if they didn’t wish to pay for a .com domain. I see you missed pointing out this fact out in your article.
However we would like to thank you for your efforts in highlighting this out so that we could continue to improve the finer details like this in our future campaigns. We will be contacting all our participants from this campaign to ensure that they clearly understand the idea of it and we will provide more hand holding to the participants to ensure that their website is successfully setup!
As for our 24×7 support, I am pretty sure it’s an application glitch on the Live Chat icon as we are online all the time, (even public holidays!) as our support operates in 2 daily shifts. While we are working on the Live Chat icon on our website, please feel free to call our 24×7 support hotline number anytime of the day at: +603-20318850.
Thanks again!
I believe I did not misunderstand any of the context earlier, just that the issue I was highlighting, use simple lay-man term in any contest, not by throwing big words – “Cloud Hosting” and mislead others to sign up for that contest. Nevertheless, I hope Shinjiru would improve in all necessary aspects. Thanks
Wow Adrian, I didn’t know your articles could catch some attention from them. Anyway, I have to honestly say that banner saying cloud hosting did give me that idea domain was free..
Shinjiru > YES, your company didn’t mention that it was free but neither your side highlighted that. Since I was not participating in this content, I would not feel how your friend feel, Adrian but if i were to be in his / her shoe it’s a little bit ripped off. Shinjiru didn’t act dishonest but at the same time too didn’t show honesty thoroughly and misleaded some participants.
Yes I agree with your point saying not being dishonest but didn’t practice through honesty too. Well, I wouldn’t say much, I’ll leave them to reply you if they want to. As I said, I hold nothing back to them but just a true review. To be honest, their reply was acceptable but not fully acceptable though
Hey Stacey, just a quick update here with you. Looks like Shinjiru don’t want to reply anything. Actually true, the more they cover up, the more guilt they are pleading ..
For some reason, the Shixxxxx Cloud is too good to be believe
Is it ready on Cloud platform?
The minimum package is RM23 a year, or less than RM2 a month???
nothing comes free bro ^^
unlike SHINJIRU.COM the registration and other technical things are done very quickly and we can start work with site very quickly.
Not only the initial setup, Emma. we have consider also the after support. like one of my friend who sign up for their hosting, in fact email hosting is with them too coz they claim to have no down time, just a week ago they had some server issue and email hosting were affected, called them up and say have to wait for it to resolve on its own. look at this kind of support of you had and you need to send and receive emails. moat hosting have alternative mx mail servers bit they don’t. all empty promises .
Hey I think I should have read more about web hosting before signing up. I am now sign up with them and it sucks !! Really !! No one reply when I need help and their so called 24×7 tech support is always not there. my emails are not working too.. And your review is so true about it after I confronted some of my friends who were in the competition
Well, once bitten twice shy. Get a new hosting – transfer domain / web hosting after expired that’s what i can recommend you to do for now.. But of course, if your website is important and cant afford any down time, just switch it now..
Hi Adrian,
What different if I register domain with .com /.com.my.
.com will be slow than .com.my?
Hi karseng, it doesn’t matter your domain name type .. It matters on the hosting, in other words the files stored on the server .. Comparing if a .com.my using a poor server / web hosting, the website will load slower even compared to a domain using .com ..
So the web hosting is the crucial key ..
A well-written article, thank you Adrian for sharing information that a lot of people tend to overlook.
u are most welcome .. and thanks for keep supporting us at adriancjy.com too
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