>If that happens it can still be OK but I highly recommend ensuring whichever organization has your domain's authoritative name servers has a user-modifiable DNS control panel. Some don't, and require that you send requests to their tech support via e-mail. This can still be OK but I've had a couple of extremely bad experiences with this type of support. Specifically, I made explicit, exact technical support requests and it took 12 - 24 hours to respond and when they did respond they screwed up worse than I would have believed possible, taking down existing e-mail and other services hosted by other providers. I'm looking at you, uniserve.com.
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>You probably won't need to work with DNS often after you get things set up, but having an incompetent or unresponsive DNS provider can be a nightmare.

I had a customer who had a website written by, and registered to, his programmer. The bills came to the customer, and his checks were used to pay them, for years. Then the programmer died, and GoDaddy just waited until the last month of paid service expired and simply refused to host the site any longer - asked the guy to go through some fucked up process while waiting for the best offer to just sell the domain. Luckily, the guy was a lawyer, so GoDaddy received a barrage of unpleasant options to consider, and waved a white flag after just a few days.