Domain and hosting for your business: the mistakes we see every week in Girona

Your domain and your hosting are the cheapest pieces of your digital presence and the ones that cause the most trouble. They cost little, you set them up once and then nobody looks at them for years. These are the failures we run into most often when a business in Girona asks us to audit its infrastructure.

Mistake 1: the domain is not in your name

The most serious and the most common. Somebody builds the site, registers the domain under their own account and appears as the holder. While the relationship goes well, nothing happens. The day you want to change provider, you find out that the address your customers know you by is not yours.

How to check: look up the WHOIS record for your domain (there are public lookups) or ask for access to the registrar panel. On .es, .cat and .com domains personal data can be hidden for privacy, but the registrar can always tell you who the holder is once you prove you own the company.

How it should be: the company as holder, with your tax ID and a contact email you control. Someone else managing it technically is fine; someone else owning it is not.

Mistake 2: email hanging off the same hosting as the site

Very widespread, because shared hosting throws it in for free. The problem shows up when something goes wrong: the site gets a traffic spike and email slows down; you migrate the site and email goes with it; the server lands on a blocklist because of a neighbour on the same IP and your messages start going to spam.

How it should be: email kept separate, on a service built for it (Google Workspace, Microsoft 365 or a professional mail provider). It costs a few euros per mailbox per month and decouples two things that have no reason to fall together.

Mistake 3: renewals nobody watches

An expired domain can be recovered during a grace period, but not always and not always cheaply. Some people monitor expiries to resell domains with history. Losing yours also means losing the email attached to it, which is like losing the office keys.

What to do:

• Turn on auto-renewal and check that the card on file is still valid.
• Send renewal notices to an address that does not depend on that domain.
• Put the expiry date in the company calendar, not just in somebody's inbox.

Mistake 4: improvised SSL

There is no excuse for skipping HTTPS today: free Let's Encrypt certificates are standard and renew themselves every 90 days. The problems we see are different ones:

• The certificate covers mydomain.com but not www.mydomain.com (or the other way round), and half the site throws a warning.
• Auto-renewal stopped working months ago and nobody noticed until a customer mentioned it.
• Links and assets still use http:// inside pages served over https://: the browser shows a broken padlock.

Mistake 5: choosing hosting on price alone

The €2-a-month plan exists and it works until it does not. What gets cut does not show on the invoice: resources shared with hundreds of sites, no real backups, support that answers in 72 hours and servers outside the European Union.

The criteria that actually matter:

Criterion	What to ask
Location	Where are the servers? The EU simplifies GDPR compliance and, if your audience is local, cuts latency.
Backups	How often? How many days are kept? Can I restore an earlier version myself?
Support	In what language, during what hours, with what committed response time?
Scaling	What happens the day the site gets ten times the traffic?
Exit	Can I take the site and the email away without asking permission?

How to migrate without downtime

A migration done properly is invisible to visitors. The order matters:

1. A full backup of the site and the database, verified by restoring it on the destination.
2. Build and test the site on the new server using a temporary domain or the hosts file. Test everything: forms, payments, transactional email.
3. Lower the DNS TTL to 300 seconds a day or two beforehand. The switch then propagates in minutes, not hours.
4. Freeze content changes during the migration window so no orders or new entries are lost.
5. Change the DNS records and keep the old server running for 48-72 hours while propagation finishes.
6. Review the SSL certificate, redirects, www and non-www, and Search Console.

Email is migrated separately and more carefully: create the new mailboxes, sync the history over IMAP, and only then change the MX records.

Frequently asked questions

Can I change hosting without changing my domain?

Yes. They are independent services. The domain simply points, through DNS, at whichever server you say. You can change hosting as often as you like and keep the same address.

What should all of this cost per year?

A .com or .es domain runs about €10-20 a year. Decent hosting for a corporate site starts around €100 a year. Professional email is roughly €5-7 per mailbox per month. Small numbers next to the cost of a problem.

My provider will not hand over the credentials. What can I do?

If the company is the domain holder, the registrar will return it once you prove it. Hosting is harder: if you are not the account holder, sometimes the only way out is rebuilding on a new server from a backup. Which is why this is worth fixing before you need it.

Does hosting the server in Girona help SEO?

Not directly. What helps is response speed, and a server close to your audience reduces latency. With a good CDN, physical location matters much less.

Conclusion

Check three things today: who holds the domain, where your email lives and when everything expires. Fifteen minutes that prevent the worst day of the year. If you want us to look, this is how we handle domains and hosting, or write to us and we will tell you what we find.