Here's how it works.

You have a website or an idea for one and you don't know all that much about the Internet! What's domain registration? What's the difference between that and registering for hosting? How do you get your pages up there? Who owns what? And most of all, how much should all this cost?

In the olden days, about five years ago, anyone who wanted a web site knew the answers or learned them quickly. There was no alternative.

Well, that's changed with a new kind of commercial service. I call it the "all in one solution" and, like so many commercial service models on the Internet these days, it makes the whole mess easy and relatively cheap: almost does it all for you. And then, like so much that's "easy and cheap", you find yourself trapped in a kind of cyber-hell from which there's no easy or cheap escape.

To explain this better, I'm going to explain all this domain registration and hosting business and, if I'm writing things you already know, skip down to the paragraph that starts "So here's where the problems start..."

It's actually pretty simple. Say you want a web site that is named "www.robertarobert.org". robertarobert.org is a domain: a distinct name that noone else on the Internet has (or will have once you register it). That's why you register it: because if two people have the same domain, people will go crazy trying to find your website or send you email, etc.

The organization that keeps track of these domain names is called ICANN (The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers). It's a non-profit created by the Internet industry to do what its name says: assign domain names and numbers.

It keeps this huge database and, once you're registered, that database will have the name robertarobert.org and an IP address attached to it. The IP is a four section number (People Link's is 216.223.198.242) and the number is really the locator. It's the way people find you. ICANN tells them where to look.

So how do you register with ICANN? There are a small number of companies, called Domain registrars or registration agents, that do the registration for you. They search to make sure no one else has your name and then record the name, record the IP address you provide (I'll explain that in a second) and record your credit card information because they'll charge you anywhere from $10 to $35 more or less for one year's registration. You have to renew every year or you can register for a bunch of years and pay a higher rate.

They'll then send it to ICANN and ICANN distributes to a select group of very large computers called "DNS servers" (for Domain Name System servers). They're the Internet's traffic cops -- they direct a request to the appropriate IP number and that ends up at your site. How? Keep reading.

That IP number is the number of your hosting company or provider. So when somebody surfs the web for your website, the request goes to one of the DNS servers and that server looks up the domain name, retrieves the IP number and tells your browser what the IP number is so your browser can go there and request your website.

The hosting company, like People Link, takes the request and retrieves your site and serves it. There are several steps to that process but that's basically what happens.

It does that after you've rented hosting services from that provider because it has to set up some files and makes entries into its own databases to direct things properly.

So DNS registration is the registration of your Internet address. Hosting is the rental of your Internet apartment.

In short, they are two completely different things, done by two different kinds of companies and, by law, a company that does one cannot do the other. Period.

Which is good. Because say you want to change hosting providers. All you do is go to your registration record at your registrar and change the entry for the IP number to the IP of your new host and, in a short time, the Internet is sending people to your site on the new host. Simple...or used to be.

So here's where the problems start.

A couple of years ago, some very large hosting providers came up with a spiffy idea: let's make a deal with a DNS registrar. We can register customers' domains, charge them for the hosting services and sign them to a one-year contract. In exchange we won't charge them for the discount rate the registrar is charging us to do the hosting.

The idea grew. Registrars starting "offering" hosting services. But they really weren't providing those services; they were "passing along" customers to selected hosting providers. Hosting providers did the same in reverse: offering "domain registration" as a bundled service.

The key to it all was the "contract". You have to sign up with these guys for at least a year to preserve the "no extra charge" for the domain registration. If you break the contract, you have to pay a full rate for that domain registration.

Which would be a pain but not unreasonable if you could ever figure out who in the world the DNS registrar was. Because these hosting providers don't tell you when you first sign up. If you sign up with Angelfire or Yahoo or Earthlink or any of the "sign up for a year" programs, you are NEVER told who actually registered that domain.

So if you want to change providers, you have to call them and anyone who has done that can tell you the horror stories. I personally have to deal with one of these messes every week. In one case, with an organization that wanted to come over to People Link and had actually paid its full year contract already, the hosting provider insisted that IT was the DNS registrar. The person I spoke to thought I was ignorant about the process and insisted that, in order to change providers, the client had to pay another full year's contract, a $50 "penalty" and then the host would make the changes itself.

I told the rep that since this person had already paid for the one year that hadn't ever expired yet, the hosting company had to release the domain by law.
He insisted I was wrong. "There's no way to do that without us, sir," he said with great irritation.

Well...I did a look-up for the domain, found it at Network Solutions and made the changes myself. No extra charge to the client.

But I'm an Internet professional. Most people with web sites would never know what to do. In fact, it's all a mystified mess for most people.

This is yet another tool of control over the Internet. It can be defeated with a lot of effort and work by an individual but that's discouraging and daunting and most people will just give up. They'll be imprisoned, never knowing the rights they have over that domain and the way to exercise those rights.

So the lesson is: insist that the host tell you which registrar they are using to register the domain. If they act like they don't know what you're talking about, go somewhere else until you find an ethical company that will treat you as an adult with legal rights.

It's a small gesture that can mean something in a much larger struggle.