Question: I am going to sign up from ipage hosting services, and they offer a free domain name. My question is, should I just take that domain name or should I actually go to goDaddy.com and purchase a domain name for a year and do it that way? I only want two websites, one for personal, and one for business.

Answer:

No, you don’t, but I would highly advise you to do so if you plan on keeping your name longer than a year.  iPage is a great web hosting company, but if for some reason in the future you want to move to another host, iPage will charge you to transfer ownership of the name to yourself.  Yea, that’s right.  If you accept the free domain name offer, iPage owns the name, not you.  Also, there’s a blackout period after a name is acquired and right before it renews.  During that time you can’t transfer it.  It could end up costing you double to transfer a name if you do it at the wrong time.

DO NOT BUY A NAME FROM GoDaddy!  They cost way too much and if you want privacy protection, that’s going to be another $8.99/year.  I get all my domain names from NameCheap, including free privacy protection.  Here is a godaddy vs NameCheap comparison.

So after you buy your domain name, on the iPage order form, select the “Transfer an existing domain” to use your own name that you bought elsewhere.  It’s worded kinda goofy.  You’re not transferring the name to them, you’re transferring your hosting service to them.  Then at your domain name registrar, go into your control panel and change your DNS nameservers to the iPage servers:  ns1.ipage.com and ns2.ipage.com  Then wait about 1/2 hr or so for the name to resolve to your hosting account.