JDPFu.com 2025

Why not?

1. Offensive Speech?
2. Spam Emails
3. General technical clueless-ness
4. Domain-napping (stealing)

Offensive Speech

So, you don’t cuss or use profanity. Excellent. But that doesn’t mean someone, somewhere won’t be offended by content on your website. Most acceptable use policies contain an offensive speech clause. Those clauses boil down to if anyone complains, we’ll disable your site without telling you first. Some very large hosts have done this on multiple occasions.

Have you blogged about politics? Religion? Nazis? Dislike for a product or can anyone post a comment to your site with an offensive link in it? You are vulnerable.

Spam Emails

You need to send email from your domain. That’s the main way to communicate with the rest of the world, your customers, and potential customers. What happens when a common hack is successful against your hosted email server and you relay spam from 5pm on Friday until someone notices it on Monday morning? Well, first your domain is already on the spammers domain list. Email sent from your blocked domain will be blocked automatically by 75% of the reputable internet email systems. We all use blacklisting as a way to reduce UCE – unwanted email. Once you are on the list, it is not easy to get off it. If you don’t have anyone watching the email server, this could go on and on for weeks and months. Eventually, your ISP will turn off your account. Nice.

General technical clueless-ness

The internet is complex. Things break all the time. When a server of mine appears to be unavailable, I go through some common trouble shooting to determine the real issue. Sometimes it is connectivity, OS, and sometimes it is a DNS failure. If everything is hosted at a single provider, you probably don’t have the technical information to perform any real trouble shooting beyond calling them and saying the web site is unavailable. Whoever answers will make up an excuse and say they are checking into it. They probably don’t know anything, just how to open a ticket so the tech guys can research it. All this time, your website/email isn’t working. What is the all-in-1 host decided to turn off your machine for offensive language or some other reason? Will they actually tell you that immediately? Perhaps, perhaps not. More downtime. You are completely dependent on this provider to solve everything, in their own due time.

Domain-napping

It happens every day. A domain registration expires and the owner forgets to renew or move the domain to a different registrar. 10 seconds after it expires, someone else pays $1.95 and they own the domain name. They just stole your piece of the internet. Nice. If you pay them $3000, you can have it back. Are you a company? Then the price is $30,000. Are you a famous company? $300,000. Not a bad return for $2 and good timing. Placing a lock on your domain will help, but be certain to follow up with any emails, even suspicious looking email, that claim anything about your domain registration. Call the provider you paid and ask questions to determine whether the email was true. Also, if you are unhappy with the registrar, be certain to start the domain transfer 60 days before the end of your paid period. This will allow ample time to get everything moved and not force you into paying for another year at the old provider should the transfer take more than 30 days.

These are just a few reasons why you shouldn’t use an all-in-1 hosting provider. Rather, you should split these three key things up

The key things are:
1) Registrar
2) DNS
3) Hosting

Place each of these at independent companies. Yes, it isn’t as easy to setup, and you’ll have to know your stuff to do it properly, but you’ll have fewer hassles in the end.

If anyone is interested, we can discuss what each of these things are for. The purpose, as it were.