Keeping control of your domain
Keeping your domain separate from your hosting is best practice, and we will say so even though we sell domains. Why it matters, what we suggest, and how to point a domain at Rack1.
We sell domains, and we would like to sell you one. Register with us and you get one login, one bill and one place to ask when something goes wrong. For a lot of sites that is genuinely the right answer.
We are still going to tell you that keeping your domain separate from your hosting is best practice, because it is. Your domain is the one part of this arrangement that is entirely yours, and the more control you keep over it, the less any hosting company can do to make leaving difficult. That includes us.
We would rather earn your business every month than rely on you being stuck with us. So here is the honest version of the trade-off.
Why separating them is best practice
Leaving stays easy
If your host also holds your domain, then moving away means asking the company you are leaving to release the one thing that makes leaving possible. Most providers handle this properly. Some are slow about it, and a few make it deliberately painful.
When your domain lives elsewhere, moving host is a nameserver change. It takes a few minutes and nobody's permission.
One bad day stays one bad day
A billing card that expires, a payment dispute, a support disagreement: any of these can put a hosting account on hold. If the same account holds your domain, your website and your email and your domain can all stop at once.
Keeping them apart means a problem with one is a problem with one.
The clocks are very different
Changing nameservers takes minutes, and the internet catches up within a day. Transferring a domain between registrars is a different exercise: you need an authorisation code, both sides have to agree, it typically takes five to seven days, and a domain is usually locked against transfer for 60 days after it is registered or moved.
That asymmetry matters on the worst day. If you need to move hosting urgently, you want that to be the fast operation, not one gated behind a week-long domain transfer.
What we suggest
If you are running a personal site or a small project and you value having one bill and one login, register with us. It is a fair trade and we will look after it properly.
If you are running something that matters to your income, or you look after sites for clients, keep the domain at a dedicated registrar. Turn on two-factor authentication there, keep the contact email address current and somewhere you will still read in three years, and consider registry lock if your registrar offers it.
Our hosting is identical either way. Nothing is held back and nothing costs more depending on where your domain lives.
If your domain is somewhere else
Point it at our nameservers. That is the whole job.
ns1.rack1dns.com
ns2.rack1dns.com
ns3.rack1dns.com
ns4.rack1dns.com
Set all four. Most registrars only insist on two, but using all four gives your domain more to fall back on if one is ever unreachable.
We have written step-by-step instructions for the registrars people actually use, including GoDaddy, Namecheap, Porkbun, Hover, Ionos and Squarespace, in our documentation:
One thing worth doing before you switch: nameservers control your whole domain, not just your website. If your email is with a third party, copy your MX, SPF, DKIM and DMARC records across first, or mail will stop arriving. If you are not sure what you have, send us the domain and we will look at the records with you before anything changes.
If your domain is with Cloudflare
Cloudflare Registrar requires domains registered there to use Cloudflare's own nameservers. You cannot point them at ours, and that is a Cloudflare rule rather than a limitation on our side.
This does not stop you hosting with us. It just means the DNS records need to be created manually in your Cloudflare dashboard instead of being handled by our nameservers.
Get in touch and we will help you set them up. We will give you the exact records to enter, check them once they are in place, and tell you if anything looks wrong. It is a short job when you know the values, and an irritating afternoon when you do not.
The short version
Register your domain wherever you like. If that is with us, good. If it is somewhere else, point four nameservers at us and everything works identically.
We want to keep your business by being worth staying with. A domain you control is what makes staying a real choice rather than the path of least resistance, and we think you should have it.
