If you intend to buy a new domain name for a Site System™ website, PLEASE speak to us first as some domain name registrars promise the earth for a pittance, but then trap you whereby you cannot transfer your name away, despite what they might say. The importance of buying your name from the right supplier cannot be overstated. Please let us buy the name on your behalf through a respected registrar.
If you own an existing domain name, you can either ask for it to be 'pointed' at our name-servers, or you can transfer control of the name to Easily Limited, the second largest domain company in the UK and our preferred supplier. This will not affect the domain name ownership but it does mean that we can then control exactly where the domain name is pointing, so if we need to move servers we can do so seamlessly.
For buying or looking after our clients' domain names, we charge a fixed fee of £35 pa +VAT regardless of the suffix. This includes administration, renewal fees and DNS hosting. There are no transfer fees associated with our services and the client remains the domain name owner.![]()
Internet servers are identified by a unique IP address (e.g. 132.185.132.204), but this is not easy to remember so a system called DNS allows us to associate a text string called a domain name (e.g. sitesystem.co.uk) with a server's IP address. A web address is used to locate HTML pages on a particular server (e.g. www.sitesystem.co.uk), and an email address (e.g. info@sitesystem.co.uk) points emails to mail accounts, often on the same server as the website.
The legalities surrounding domain names are complex, but in effect, domain names are leased and must have their ownership renewed every year or two. The main types of domain suffix in use by UK businesses are: 'com' (the worldwide suffix for 'commercial'); co.uk (the standard UK commercial suffix); 'org' (strictly speaking for use by non-profit organisations); and 'net' (for internet companies). Many other suffixes are in use, but people will rarely try to guess a domain name beyond 'com' or 'co.uk'.