Some domain registrars have high fees to transfer your domain to another registrar. easyspace.com, for example, charges $22 to transfer your domain or $37 to change the owner! Their 45 page long Terms & Conditions includes:

You agree that you may not transfer a domain name registration to another domain name registrar during the first sixty (60) days from the effective date of the initial domain name registration with us. After that time, you may transfer your domain name registration to a third party domain name registrar of your choice, subject to our then-current policies and procedures incorporated herein by reference.

Note the marked part! Basically they can add whatever they want after you have agreed! I use Dynadot for all my domain registrations and they don’t charge for domain transfers or owner changes at all and they have some of the lowest pricing.

The same kind of hidden fees can be found with hosting services. The dedicated servers I have running all come with 2000GB of traffic included and I used about another 20GB on one of them. Yes, 20GB is a lot of traffic, more than most shared hosting plans include, but in this case it was only 1% more then I had paid for. The invoice I got, on top of my regular hosting fee, was enough to cover the expenses for another dedicated server, plus setup cost!

Already knowing about the high price of usage beyond the plans included bandwidth, I always keep a close eye on how much I use. But it turned out that the traffic reports you can view in cpanel are not what the billing is based on. The traffic used on the server is measured at the switch that the server is connected to. You can see those numbers too, but only after you ask for it!

After opening a support ticket for this issue, I got the standard reply. Something like: I can’t help you, the invoice has been created and has to be paid or your server will be taken offline. After mailing with both the support and billing departments a few times, and basically being told the same shit again, I looked up who is in charge and gave him a call. Within a few minutes I had access to the traffic stats on the switch and the extra bandwidth bill had been canceled. It’s all about talking to the right guy.

Costs like these are often not easy to spot. The endlessly long terms & conditions you have to agree upon are almost always too long to read and even if you manage to read the whole thing, you will probably not understand half of it because of the way things are formulated.

But don’t despair, sites like Web Hosting Talk are a good place to find out about which hosting provider is good and which ones will screw you. Remember Google is your friend, when it comes to finding reviews about companies. Do your homework before signing up for anything!

This step can be a bit tedious, as most names you can think of have already been registered, many of them by domain hijackers who offer them for sale for ridiculous amounts. Don’t give up, eventually you will find one that is free and can be registered for under ten bucks.

When I look for a new domain name I usually grab a piece of paper and a pencil and I start writing down words that relate to the subject of my planned website. Combining the words in the list will quickly result in a big list of potential names for the website. If you think your list is too short, add terms like net, web and online and use these to make new word combinations.

Once you feel that your list of potential names is big enough, go online and check if any of them are available for registration. I use Dynadot for all my domain registrations and I’m very happy with their service. Dynadot is an ICANN accredited domain registrar and webhost, which means that they are right at the top of the domain registration chain, unlike domain resellers. The domain registration is fully automated, meaning that whenever you register a new domain name, it is ready for use within seconds.

Other domain registrars I have worked with require human intervention on the registrar side, which can take anywhere from a few hours to a couple of days until you can use your domain name. Another big plus of Dynadot is that they accept PayPal payments, so you don’t have to wait for bank transfers to complete or checks to clear. Dynadot also offers hosting services. I have not used their hosting service myself, but I’m sure it’s as good as their domain registration service.

If the .com name you like has already been registered by someone else, you might be able to register the .net or .org or some other extension. If multiple extensions are available for registration, you could register all of them, so no one else can register them later and cause confusion on your name.