Cheap, effective web hosting, and the transferring of domain names

Seattle Thread

Our website expired today, and after dealing with many, many frustrations with our provider (iPower), I've decided that this would be the perfect opportunity to jump ship. We don't need a whole lot of storage or bandwidth at all. The cheaper the better, at this point.

My second question involves registering our domain name with the new host. iPower currently holds the domain information, so I assume that if I go to www.babysfirstwebhost.com and try and set something up it'll claim that my domain is unavailable. How do I move said information over, to prevent interruption to our email and the like?

Szechuanosaurus

iPower should have a system in place to release the domain name so that it can be transferred to a new host. Depending on how they are set up, this will either be possible to do manually through your user control panel at iPower or you may have to request in writing to them that it is released. I'll go take a look and see if I can find the relevant help article on their website.

Edit: Ok, they don't have any instructions for transfering your domain from iPower to elsewhere, only from elsewhere to iPower (I get why you want to move). Basically you need to find the domain configuration in your control panel, Unlock the domain then then go through the transfer process at your newly elected registrar. This is assuming that iPower allows you to manually unlock domains.

Edit edit: Sorry, you don't need to change nameservers, that's for pointing a domain to a different host.

exoplasm

You set up a name transfer at your new registrar/host (I highly recommend namecheap.com) and then you have to get a transfer code from ipower (either by e-mail or phone).

For hosting, if you just want cheap you can go with dreamhost, hostgator, apollohosting, simplehelix and many other similar places.

Depending on how your site is setup, you may or may not notice a performance difference.

I highly recommend registering/transferring the domain to a registrar and get the web hosting separate from that, so that you can move your site from host to host independently of the domain registration.