brianf, that's what I've always done. I've never registered my domains through my webhost. Then again, I've been registering domains since the early 1990s, when few web hosts offered domain registration service - so to me, that's the normal way to do things. To someone new to the internet, this might seem overly cumbersome...but having the domain registered through someone other than the host does give the site owner a bit more control.