Who Hosts Your Domain Name?

Who Hosts Your Domain Name?

We just went through the process of moving all our hosted email clients from an end-of-life anti-spam service to a new service. This kind of project is typical in the IT industry, but we always learn a ‘lesson’ during the course of the work. In this case, we found out that a few of our clients have some pretty risky (sketchy) companies hosting their domain.

Your domain name is the website address, the extension on your email address; basically, the location of your company’s online presence. Two of the most well-known and reputable companies are Go Daddy and Network Solutions. Did I mention this is the location of your online presence? Not a place to cut corners.

In making this anti-spam change, we had to point the new anti-spam service to each client’s hosted domain provider. The anti-spam service filters inbound and outbound email messages and often filters 90+ percent of the incoming mail as junk. When this service stops or fails, you are inundated with ridiculous and offensive email, non-stop!

We had to contact each client’s domain hosting company and re-point the MX records; suffice it to say that we were re-routing to the new filtering source. Well, we came across some pretty scary scenarios. Some of these were one-man shops; what if they go out of business? Some we could only contact via email and had to wait for them to respond in order to make the change.

Your domain name is a very important part of your online identify. Give some serious thought to moving it to a business-class organization. It is worth the few extra bucks you might have to spend. – CMW