And you run and you run to catch up with the sun but it's sinking Racing around to come up behind you again The sun is the same in a relative way, but you're older Shorter of breath and one day closer to death
It was a .com one. I have to say I'm surprised at that. I've never heard of domains+hosting (200MB) being so cheap. At that cost I thought it was for a month, rather than a year, but no, seems I was wrong! Nice... I might have to get one myself then.. hehehe.
As far as hosting goes though...you get what you pay for. There really are no free lunches.
I use and recommend Pair Networks. Not cheap, but damn good. http://www.pair.com.
And you run and you run to catch up with the sun but it's sinking Racing around to come up behind you again The sun is the same in a relative way, but you're older Shorter of breath and one day closer to death
Price isn't everything. I use Ichibanweb Domains because they have 24-hour phone support in English. Domain--I'll gladly pay the difference to not spend hours struggling with Japanese support. There's rarely more than a few minutes wait on hold, too.
Another thing I like about Ichiban is that they rent mailboxes without web site hosting. I used to use pair.com and hated having to pay for a web site I wasn't using.
At Ichiban, a .com domain is $7.85 and includes a mailbox (including POP and SMTP service) so, you can have your own domain and email for under 1,000 yen/year.
A .jp address ranges from 7,000 to 9,000 yen a year.
You can now register them through http://www.godaddy.com (who have a pretty darn good service), or deal with a local domain name provider.
As far as hosting goes - I wouldn't go with a local provider. All the plans I've seen are complete ripoffs. I use http://www.icdsoft.com, they have been very reliable over the 3 years I've used them and have helpful and prompt support usually.
There really is no advantage in choosing the local server hosts except maybe in some instances you'll get late hour support. A lot of times, these places are inefficient and won't get the job done right away and it's no different than choosing a server that resides far away in some Carribean island since most communication is done through email. The bottom line is that getting any service in Japan costs an arm and a leg and Japan is one of the last few places that doesn't quite understand the simple concept of outsourcing and competitive pricing.