I see that most of the hosting sites expect clients to have their domain name registered elsewhere.

I am thinking that most of my clients will be NEW clients and will want to register and host from the same place.

Anyone know how I can have them register for a domain name and also choose a hosting package at the same time. I dont' want to tell my clients to go to GoDaddy.com and register and then come back to me for hosting.

Thanks. ;)

If I were a client, I'd *rather* register my domain with someone other than my hosting provider.

Yes, that's very true to some extent. I personally register my domains elsewhere and my hosting elsewhere also.

But, if I were a small business, and not a very tech savvy business, why would I want to go to two places when I can get this done at one.

I think alot of people are new to having a website and think that they can do both at one site.

Does anyone agree? .. Disagree?

:cool:

I agree with you. Why would you want to send potential customers away from your site. Yeah, its not great to prey on the uninformed, but alot of people will like the convience of doing both things at once, even if it costs them a couple more bucks.

Do you know any companies who offer domain registration as a 'reseller' type situation? I am interested in this too, so let me know what you find out.

I hear Dotster.com and also AllDomains.com both have "reseller" programs for domains.

You can try and see how they are.

cooler,

Why not look at OpenSRS? They are reliable (it's tucows) and the price is good. I register my domains with 000domains.com, which is just a reseller of OpenSRS.

Frank

Well, there wouldn't be one way to accomplish this. First way is completely manual. One of the form fields on your 'sign up for a package' page, would be... new domain (checkbox), plus a field for them to type in the domain. When you get the order, you see they want a domain as well, register it, etc...

Automated solutions are provided by some companies (as part of their reseller solutions, etc.), but assuming you aren't with a company that has this (assuming because you are asking this question in the first place), you could automate some of this yourself with some scripting or even simply having two 'paths' customers can follow... eh?

Well, fully automated being that many registrars have scripts you can register domains with, directly from your site. You could pass along values from these scripts, to your own order forms and do the whole thing in one shot.

About the 'path' thing... well, even less automated, if the person wants hosting, they click one button and go through your sign up process. If they want hosting and a domain, they click a different button and go through a script to register the domain, which ends up at your hosting signup pages.

Some of this depends on how your signup process works (if it is automatic and sets up the accounts, or if it is just a form that is mailed to you and you manually set up accounts, etc.) It also depends on how versed you are with working with those registrar's APIs and if you have the ability to code it all together.

If you don't have much skill in this area, then payig someone who can do it, or choosing a registrar that works something like this:

Person clicks button >
Registrar's site (often a variation of their actual site to hide the registar to a degree) >
Person completes transaction >
Returned to 'thank you' page on your site

-might work for you. The thank you page you'd return them to would instead be a sign up page for a package. Anyway, these are just some general comments and info about all of this. Much of it depends on specifics, and you'll have to decide how you want to do it, then figure out which registrars can offer the needed functionality so that you can achieve the mission.

Good luck captain!