Business Owner Technical Guide - Domains

Daniel Mitchell -

Any new business owner needs a domain. Essential for your web presence, emails and other internet services.

Most important is that you maintain ownership of the domain. Don't allow an outsource web development company to register the domain on your behalf. If you ever have issues with that company then they have you over the barrel. Of if you wish to engage other professionals and developers then any DNS changes will require raising support tickets or emails to get those changes done. If you own the domain you have the control to make these changes as and when you need to.

Domain Registrar

Where should you register your domain at? CloudFlare - Hands down the best place to register your domain name.

  • Pricing, they register domains at cost, which makes them the cheapest place to register your domain name. (.com addresses cost just under £7 per year depending on the $ exchange rate)
  • SSL encryption at no cost.
  • Easy multi user account access. - This means no sharing of your login details, simply create a new account for your developer and other team members. Plus any changes or edits are audited and logged so you can see who made what change and when. To set this up see the guide CloudFlare - Add user to account.
  • Email - Simple unlimited email forwarding.
  • CDN and more. - CloudFlare provide many additional networking services. One of the most useful is its CDN service that speeds up your website. Yes, its free! They provide a generous free tier that can cover for hundreds of thousands of visitors and save significant bandwidth costs. - Other services (some require additional payment) include Workers (FaaS), Load Balancing, DDoS protection and CloudFlare Access (Access private resources without a VPN).
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Always register and own your domain names.

Domain Forwarding

Most people will forward the root (or 'naked') domain to the 'www' version. i.e. daniel-mitchell.com automatically redirects to www.daniel-mitchell.com. When setting this up its worth verifying that this redirect works both on http and https connections. Depending on the user and what browser they are using can determine what domain and internet protocol they arrive at first.