When migrating our company's 15 domains away from GoDaddy I evaluated around a dozen registrars. Our criteria may be different from yours. With millions of subdomains and tens of millions of user-generated pages, we needed a registar that would absolutely honor our rights as domain owners. This was our top priority. Our lowest priority was cost, though there was a reasonable upper bound on what we'd pay per year. Features are somewhere in the middle -- we didn't want or need lots of extras.
Our priorities were:
1. rights as domain owners
2. registar stability
3. control panel usability
4. extra features (DNS, etc.)
5. cost
The winner was Gandi. Their combination of common-sense, customer-friendly terms and European privacy laws made the choice easy.
Read your registrar's terms. See if you still want to save that $6 a year.
i dropped gandi this year because they emailed me asking for 1) copy of drivers license, 2) proof of residence, and the current drivers license address must match whatever your current address is. they gave me 1 week to comply or face deletion of account. they claimed it was a regular/random check, but offered no answer to my questions other than "you must provide". i immediately transferred to name.com because they have a telephone number and they answer it. gandi does NOT have a support phone number.
I have 63 domains and 5 SSL certs with GoDaddy. While they're definitely not a favorite company, I don't hate them so much that I'm willing to go to the trouble of transferring everything.
If you really can't handle their upselling or bad UX, then just use their mobile site (http://godaddymobile.com) or iPad app.
If you have issues with Parsons or their way of doing business, fine–I get that. Otherwise, meh ... just buy your domains and get to work.
I totally agree. We have over 100 domains and 10 SSL certs with GoDaddy. Sure it gets a little annoying opting out of upsells, setting the domains to manual renewal, and changing the registration to 1 year with every purchase, but it adds a net of maybe 15 seconds to the purchase. That's well worth the savings and the flexibility they actually provide through DNS controls.
Their customer service is great and you can always get in touch with someone if you need any kind of support. Also, the iPhone app is really great. I don't know why that doesn't get more attention, but it's the most powerful Domain or DNS management app I've seen out there.
Like Callmeed, if you want to avoid them 100% b/c of Parsons, then I respect that. Otherwise, they're a budget provider that does a good job when stacked up against other budget providers in different verticals.
One of my criteria for a good registrar measures how much effort it takes to transfer a domain away from the registrar.
I love godaddy's customer support even though I am no longer a customer, don't get me wrong. I loved that I could just call them at 4 in the morning with a random problem. What I didn't love was that I had to call them up and live through upsells and boredom in the process of trying to initiate a domain transfer. I unlocked my domain in question, verified the email address, but then I couldn't send an auth code to a known-working admin email and...yeah.
I've also moved clients' names away from Network Solutions, since those support people were just beyond unbelievable. One particular support person was telling me that there was a chance I was going to lose the domain if I initiated a transfer and that there would be nothing they could do about it if that happened. I almost lost my cool at that point.
No company is perfect and sometimes they have really aggressive retention policies for their support people to follow. I get that. So I'm willing to pay extra for registrars that make it braindead easy for me to do what it takes to get away from them should the need arise. I use dynadot and gandi right now quite happily and have never had problems with the company or their management or their UI for managing domain names.
You clearly have missed a lot when it comes to GoDaddy. You've made the same mistakes that many have made repeatedly. Everytime it's the same, "we thought we were fine, just hosting some domains", right before they have downtime because their hosting was suspended or DNS info dropped at a whim that GoDaddy acted upon with little short-term recourse.
Right, it's the PayPal Law. You'll use PayPal fine for 8 years, and then one day they'll totally fuck you over in ways that you can't imagine. Same with GoDaddy. You'll use them fine forever, and then they'll totally fuck you over.
This is from a GoDaddy customer of at least 4 years, and I've never been fucked over by them, but I've seen it happen a lot.
And neither did any of the many others, until they did.
Google "GoDaddy domain problem", "GoDaddy horror stor(y/ies)", etc (I'm too lazy to hyperlink the first 5 links I found in less than a minute of searching). It's just silly to rely on GoDaddy at all these days, in my opinion.
A year or so ago I regretfully moved _to_ GoDaddy because they were one of the only registrars I could find that supported IPv6 glue records (i.e. you run your own nameservers with IPv6 connectivity, so a lookup of example.com also returns an IPv6 address for ns1.example.com)
Many of the smaller players just go through OpenSRS which at least recently only could add IPv6 glue with manual intervention. Maybe they've (finally) fixed that by now.
I would like to get back off GoDaddy someday soon, but I've been worried that my IPv6 glue will break. Does anybody know a registrar with solid IPv6 experience?
We've started building a new domain management service at http://iWantMyName.com and we're bootstrapped, profitable and proud as 37signals would say... ;)
Here is some more background information from a co-founder perspective:
I've been using this for a while, the site is beautiful, simple and fast, it's like the anti-godaddy in the best possible way. the online support is also some of the best I've experienced. really great job guys.
Not yet. We're accredited for some ccTLDs and will add further accreditations as we grow. That's a common practice at lots of registrar companies. Even the big ones like GD, NetSol etc. are "only" resellers for some ccTLDs. We've got an excellent relationship with our ICANN registrar and access to all management functions so there isn't really a difference technology-wise.
Through our work on Domainr (http://domai.nr/ -- a domain availability search engine) I've gotten to know folks at:
- iWantMyName (Timo already posted in this thread)
- 101domain
- Dreamhost
- DNSimple
...and I'd personally recommend all of them, for having solid services, ethical business practices, and good design (for iWMN and DNSimple). I've also heard good things about Namecheap and Gandi from a few friends.
The answer to your question is likely that MarkMonitor specializes in corporate domain management, and the services they probably offer make it worthwhile to not do everything in-house even at these major tech companies. I can only guess at what might be involved, but I mean hey, there must be a reason, right?
It's not just tech companies (Apple and Microsoft included) that have them listed as registrars, it's companies from my bank (Chase) to my ISP (Time Warner) too. The portfolio, so to speak, of MarkMonitor and their clients says a lot. Especially in the face of cheap .com renewals with Go Daddy :p
You're right, MarkMonitor's portfolio is truly impressive, so there must be something to it. I just thought that precisely those top tech companies (maybe not banks) would appreciate having the additional security layer that arguably comes from being your own registrar, and do so effortlessly.
Perhaps. Then again, with an agreement between the companies involved and whatever mostly-unknown-to-us services they provide, the additional security layer you speak of could be meaningless. I doubt most of the legal teams of said corporations would be okay with this arrangement if it was potentially insecure. And of course there is no such thing as "effortlessly", someone somewhere has to be around to manage the huge domain name portfolios these corporations have.
I really wish MarkMonitor's website wasn't basically a bunch of marketing mumbo jumbo about all the services they provide. It'd be interesting to find out what they are being paid to do (even in brief) for all these major companies. For all we know they could just be a glorified godaddy for corporations that buy and hold a lot of domain names as far as their domain registry service is concerned.
what about nearlyfreespeach.net ? I'm surprise no one has mentioned them. I've been quite happy with them and they're seemingly on the pretty aggressive side of nice pricing and digital rights.
I've never found a more honest company. For example, they recently discovered a billing error that amounted to $56 over 5 years .. so they refunded everyone double, donated what they couldn't refund to charity, and apologized profusely. (http://blog.nearlyfreespeech.net/2011/04/07/a-small-billing-...)
My one criticism of NFS is that there's no way to save a credit card on file. Certainly makes those "inspiration struck, better go register the domain" purchases much more of a have-to-pull-out-the-wallet ordeal... but maybe making random domains more annoying to buy is actually a good thing.
That is because they use a prepaid model instead of charging you after the registration. Just keep a couple bucks in your account and you can register domains even when you don't have a credit card handy.
As an aside, have any of those inspiration struck domains ever paid off or been developed further? I ask because I've registered about 50 of them over the last 3 and a half years and after a good nights sleep the fire has usually died down and they languish in my account until expiry...
I'm not entirely sure of how it works these days, but when I used to host sites there they required you to host your sites on NFS if you wanted to qualify for the cheap domain registrations.
Domain registrations are always $8.99/year at NFSN. Whois privacy costs $0.01/day, but you get a 20% rebate if you prepay it. DNS costs $0.01/day for each domain not registered with them and $0.01/(3 days) for every domain registered with them. If you also host your website (A record for the main website points to NFSN) with them they reduce it to $0.01/(3 days) and $0.01/(9 days) respectively.
To sum it up: If you register your domain with NFSN, use their DNS servers but not their hosting offers you will pay $10.21/year, which is $0.82/year more than the $9.40 you will pay if you also use their hosting offers.*
* Beware of the rounding errors in my floating point math.
I'm now gradually migrating all domains off GoDaddy (just waiting for them to expire), so this list comes in quite handy.
I'm moving to https://www.dynadot.com/, but no one has mentioned it here. Prices are ok, UI is simple. DNS management is simple too, so probably will not suit everyone. No upselling. So far I'm liking them, but bear in mind, I'm only few months with them.
Just wondering if anyone has any experience with DynaDot and how they compare to others on the list (especially Gandi, as it looked quite interesting)?
I've used them a few years now and have been really happy. Not feature-rich but they cover the basics and have reasonable prices with no upsell pressure.
We use Dnsimple. It's not Cheap, but if you have a bunch of domains it's incredibly helpful and just gets out of the way and works. For some reason propogation of changes is always seems faster too.
For all our super cool (.io) domains, we use iwantmyname. No frills, fantastic support and simple UI.
I use several registrars for various reasons but so far NameCheap have been my favorite. They're on the list but wanted to give them a thumbs up here. No nonsense from them and their free "WHOIS guard" is a nice touch.
tucows used to be Canadian, IIRC (Toronto?). Rebranded or sold the domain business to Hover; not sure about them.
Hover seems to have a decent reputation, and are fairly price competitive. Not as cheap as e.g. Namecheap, but close.
With all the seizure BS and whatnot, I'm thinking of moving some things really off-shore. Maybe Switzerland? Or I recently read that the Bahamas are good at telling various law enforcement agencies to f-off. Not sure I believe it, though.
(I'm not actually running anything gray, let alone black. I'd move partly on principle, and partly because things only look to get worse.
For me, it would be more a matter of free speech. Perhaps also free and anonymous speech (at least, anonymous to most private and commercial interests).
P.S. freejack, I just noticed one of your other comments. You're with Tucows? Are you still (really) Canadian? Are Canadian registrars holding their own against Washington (and, these days, Ottawa, I guess)?
Honestly, as a freelancer, if you want to keep your domains and email on GD, that is fine with me. Their shared hosting is so inexcusably slow and difficult to manage,it makes me wonder why there hasn't been a class action lawsuit against them. Hyperbole, I know, but they suck at hosting! IF a potential client has space up there, the first thing I do is have them move it.
For a simple registrar that supports DNSSEC I've been quite happy with https://www.gkg.net/. Their prices are reasonable and their site is quick and functional, though it's navigation is a bit clumsy. I can't comment on their hosting (including DNS) as I've not used it.
I've been happy with Dotster for my domain registration and some DNS management and have been slowly moving domains over from GD to them. Anyone else have input on Dotster?
I'm sure this is common practice, but I don't like that Tucows (Hover) is squating 200k premium domains and auctioning expiring domains. I have too much disdain for cyber squatters to respect Hover as a registrar.
We don't run any auctions and the bulk of our portfolio was acquired on the open market as part of corporate acquisitions (i.e. we bought businesses that owned their own large portfolios). Cybersquatter? I'd love to know how you are defining that term. Usually reserved for scumbags that sit on other peoples trademarks, I can assure you that Tucows is not cybersquatting. If you mean have registered a domain name you want before you thought of it, then... well, tough. We're actually using the vast majority of the names we own as part of our premium email business, etc. These aren't just parking pages etc.
I was looking for this post or one just like it a few months ago but I didn't find one.
I went with Gandi.fr instead and I'm so very much happier than with Godaddy and its awful peers. Unfortunately I have to pay in euros. But it was worth it.
That a random article on the Internet can't cover all registrars? :)
Dynadot is IMHO the best registrar ever.
This speaks volumes:
Domain Name:WIKILEAKS.ORG
Created On:04-Oct-2006 05:54:19 UTC
Last Updated On:24-May-2011 23:27:29 UTC
Expiration Date:04-Oct-2018 05:54:19 UTC
Sponsoring Registrar:Dynadot, LLC (R1266-LROR)
Status:CLIENT TRANSFER PROHIBITED
Their admin interface is significantly worse and they lack many of the options found on other registrars like Namecheap or Gandi. They don't even offer DDNS or TXT records.
For registering a new domain I would recommend google apps, because of all the google apps integration to your domain. And if you are looking for server hosting I would recommend linode.
Our priorities were:
The winner was Gandi. Their combination of common-sense, customer-friendly terms and European privacy laws made the choice easy.Read your registrar's terms. See if you still want to save that $6 a year.