Slashdot Mirror
Who is the Best Registrar?
luge asks: "I've been looking around at a couple of NSI's new competitors (register.com, for example), and the information on their pages about services and pricing for them is underwhelming at best. I also haven't been able to find any good comparisons on the Web. So, in the experience of the /. community, what is the best registrar to go through for my new Web site? I'm particularly interested in interim services- i.e., I want to grab a few domains now but won't have a good connection/hosting situation for a few months yet, so I'm interested in what options there are for services like URL and e-mail forwarding. Of course, pricing is probably paramount, but ease of manageability is important too- once I get my hosting situation settled, I want to be able to switch over quickly and easily. Any suggestions?"
And the ever continuing quest to look for a decent replacement for NSI continues, and as far as I can tell via various rumors and experiences of other folks, this may not be a bad thing at all. We've handled a similar Ask Slashdot, but it's been four months since that was posted and I figure it's high time to revisit the topic since I still get a lot of these sorts of questions in the submissions bin.
The list of accredited ICAAN registars is at InterNic.net. This is just to let you know the alternatives, and if some registration company is really allowed to register domains.
The register.com folks have always been helpful, even calling long-distance to Canada to resolve a problem I was having with them. Also, making changes to the domain name information takes place almost immediately.
Contrast this to Network Solutions. It can take up to three days to get information changed in their database and they often seem to ignore messages requesting support.
I would definitely choose register.com over Network Solutions in the future. Of course, with the other, cheaper, companies out there, register.com may now have a run for their money.
Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.
--
I have been very happy with their service, both for domain name registration, and for hosting. AFAIK, they are the only ones who offer domain parking free, and the registration costs only $30.00 (yep, that's $15 a year).
Check them out at npsis.com.
Dotster.com is what I used, and they gave me quick service and their registration fee was only $15/year(don't know if it's still that cheap though), which is $20 less than all other services. I highly recommend them.
-Julius X
-Julius X
remove "-whatkindofspamdoyoutakemefor-" from email to send
I personally prefer .cx, myself; they're cheaper, have great service, VERY nice policies (particularly when it comes to namespace conflicts such as in the case of trademark disputes - they'll only remove/freeze a registration with a court order), and, recently, have taken to providing free service for free(speech) and open source software projects.
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Quine "quine?
For example, one webhost I use, WorldWebserver.com, offers free domain registration with hosting. But if you're getting, "just domain registration" for $25/year you get one page hosting of one-page site that you can change whenever you want, a catch-all POP3 email box, http logs including http_referer and graphical stats. That's a lot better deal that having your parked domain point at an ad for the registrar!
You can actually do alot with a one-page domain. I've used a few as "storefronts" for affiliate links, or you can just use it for your "front page" and have your other pages on the web space that comes with your dial-up.
Plus the tech support at worldwebserver.com is amazing. Anyway, that's my 2 cents. Oh and they use Apache on Slackware too.
========
+++For-pay Internet distributed processing.+++
<sig>Guvf vf abg n frperg zrffntr
First, a word about register.com. You may want to read through the DNSO archives, the IFWP list, and the DOMAIN-POLICY archives to see what register.com has been up to, particularly regarding the single-letter domains.
You may also want to have a look at their registration agreement, particularly the bit on information ownership. They own all your contact information, and can do whatever they want with it.
Note the section in 6d above where they explicitly say you give them the right to use your information for targeted marketing.
Others aren't any better. BulkRegister has been phone-spamming people with completely automated unsolicited phone calls, in violation of US State and Federal law.
Joker.com and the other current and past CORE registrars have had significant problems in the past, and CORE is losing registrars right and left.
Most of the registrars have had significant and in some cases highly-publicised problems interacting using the SRS -- the Shared Registry System, resulting in things like aol.com's ownership being transferred to an individual (and later changed back), and other domain names not owned by big companies not being so lucky in having their ownership info corrected.
There's a problem with CORE registrars as well...several years ago, when people were once again trying to get new Top-Level Domains (TLDs), CORE managed to have a set of 7 TLD agreed upon. CORE registrars were pre-selling registrations in these 7 TLDs last year. They've now stopped, but should those & go active, it's still unknown whether or not anyone will have a fair shot at registering within them due to these pre-sells.
I'd personally recommend becoming a member of the OpenSRS project, and being your own registrar.
If you can't or won't do that, then do the following: Find and take the time to READ each registrar's Domain Dispute Policy and Registration Agreement, and think of what it means to you if your domain name ownership is challenged. The challenges are mushrooming, and all signs point to corporations getting whatever they want. Go see the resolved UDRP cases to get a feeling for how the wind is currently blowing.
.@.
The Christmas Island registry (http://www.nic.cx) does a pretty fine job of things.
Firstly it's only £20 for the first two years, £10 a year after that.
Then they offer free domains to open source projects.
Also they will give you unlimited email forwarding rules (i.e. as many email addresses @domain.cx to forward to wherever).
Then they will give you web aliasing, that is http://www.domain.cx will display the content of, for example, http://www.geocities.com/wherever/mywebpage/
Not bad for such a low price.
--
-- Slashdot sucks.
When you register a domain, youre just buying the rights to a domain, right? Or wrong? I'm trying to figure out where the DNS comes in.
DNS is a distributed database system. Everybody who owns a domain name is responsible for keeping their domain's entries in the database correct and up to date. You can do this yourself, or pay your ISP to do it. When you go to a URL, you ask your (or your ISP's) DNS for the IP address of the site. If the server knows the IP, it tells you. If it doesn't know the IP, it has to ask somebody else.
This is where the registrars come in. They maintain the "root servers" which basically keep a list of all the domains that are registered, and the DNS servers that contain the information about that domain. When you register a domain, you're paying for an entry in these "root servers".
When somebody else looks for your domain name, their DNS server asks one of the root servers where they can find the information, and the root server points it to your DNS server. Their DNS server then asks your DNS server for the information, and your DNS server gives it to them. That's why you need a DNS server.
Are we updating people's DNS servers everytime we request a page that our DNS server is unsure about and and then has to query another DNS server out there until it finds an answer?
Yes.
_________________
rooooar
I registered through dotster at the beginning of February in order to take advantage of the $15 rate. My 2-cents: I had a few questions after registering, e-mailed them, and had a response in less than 6 hours. In my experience, good customer service-- esp. a good, fast response time-- is a very good indicator for a company's overall quality. Also, it's very easy to update/change account info (name-servers, for example) with dotster.
Much Love,
"S"HM
*****
(I refuse to spellcheck out of contempt for your belief system)
I must agree that joker.com is the best registrar I've used, by far. Register.com is more than double the price, and, while it provides dns services free, the service is poor. Changes to your records take 12-24 hours, and I've never seen one take less than 6. That's more than unacceptable, for many of us.
But here's what I've taken to doing... check out ultradns.
They're currently in beta, but you can get both a primary and secondary nameserver space from them, with a very nice, clean, secure interface, for free. (as long as it is a personal/non-commercial domain name)
You can have up to four of these, and the interface is both easy and powerful, so the advanced DNS hackers will be able to modify anything they need.
I've also found that changes go through ultradns in between 15 and 60 minutes, usually on the lower end. That's very nice, especially if you have a semi-dynamic IP.
I just registered a domain through joker.com, with dns from ultradns, and it's wonderful. My first domain was registered at register.com, and I just recently switched that domain to ultradns as well.
That, of course, brings up another problem with register.com: they don't allow zone transfers. I lost all my zone information, and had to rebuild it all. It was very icky, but it worked, and I definitely don't regret it. 95% reduction in response time is worth it for a 10 minute hassle.
Just my two cents, although it seems more like two dollars...
-Ed Fisher
this
Here's my BIND setup. I run it with the command "named -u dns -g dns -t /home/dns named.conf". This runs it as user/group "dns", chrooted to "/home/dns" for security, and reading the configuration from "/home/dns/named.conf". Here's my named.conf:
options {
/home/dns: "dev/", "master/", "var/run/". Copy your /dev/null device into your new dev/ directory. Add "-a /home/dns/dev/log" to your syslog's command line (in one of your startup scripts). Now create a "master/mydomain.com" file:
datasize 4M;
files 100;
allow-transfer { none; };
allow-query { localhost; };
};
controls {
unix "/var/run/ndc" perm 0600 owner 0 group 0;
};
acl "granitecanyon" { 205.166.226.38; 216.17.165.20; };
acl "me" { 127.0.0.1; };
zone "mydomain.com." {
type master;
file "master/mydomain.com";
allow-transfer { granitecanyon; me; };
allow-query { any; };
};
Make the following directories UNDER
@ SOA @ my.email.address. ( :) [or any other text]"
2000022701 ; serial
8H ; refresh
2H ; retry
2W ; expire
1D ) ; minimum
NS @
NS ns1.granitecanyon.com.
NS ns2.granitecanyon.com.
MX 10 @
RP my.email.address. @
TXT "DeCSS source code goes here
A 1.2.3.4 ; your IP here
localhost A 127.0.0.1
www CNAME @
ftp CNAME @
This basic setup should work if you run your own mail, web, and DNS servers, with GraniteCanyon as your backup DNS. Replace my.email.address with your email address in dot form (i.e. "me@email.com" becomes "me.email.com.").
What you are buying is a contractual right to have your domain name entered into a "zone file" for some TLD, "Top Level Domain", such as .com or .nu. As a contractual right you can do all the normal things one does with contractual rights - delegate them, use them as security, etc, subject to the limits in the registration contract.
Be forwarned: Virtually every registrar has in its registration contract a provision that allows them to take your domain name away from you pretty much at their whim.
As for DNS itself - there is a belief that there can only be a single DNS hierarchy. That is not the case. I have not used the ICANN root system for several years and am using several additional TLDs, such as .web. See my note on this at http://www.cavebear.com/cavebear/growl/issue_2.htm #multiple_roots
DNS is a hierarchially (sp) organized lookup system - it is used to map structured names into records of various types, IP address records being but one of those types. So please don't fall into the trap of equating domain names with WWW presence - DNS is used for many other thins from e-mail to voice-over-IP telephony to geographic lat/long coordinates to public key information.
Administration of DNS is organized along the lines of the hierarchy so the impact of updates is localized; there's no worldwide update protocol (although there is an update protocol between primary and secondary servers established by each administration in the hierarchy.)
As for your technical questions, you might want to check out the O'Reilly and Associates book on DNS (it may be more than you want to know.)
I also wrote up something a couple of years ago, before ICANNN, that might be helpful: http://www.cavebear.com/nsf-dns/background.htm
--karl--
Take a look at DomainMonger.com. They offer better service than NSI and register.com, but they cost only $17 to register a domain. That's right, $17 to register a domain, with no other fees. And unlike Joker and Dotster you don't have to pay for transfers, and they guarantee that they won't raise the price in the future when you have to renew your domain.
Not only that, DomainMonger.com has a cool web-based management interface that allows you to make modifications to multiple domains at one time. The manangment system uses newer and better technology, unlike other registrars who are tied to the badly implemented systems that were put in place years ago.. Check them out!
http://DomainMonger.com
At Nominalia!! They're decent I guess. Main lame point is a $60 fee to transfer ownership of the domain... they're set up for cybersquatters, clearly... (cheap initial registration, if you sell it, then you have to pay them, but who cares, cuz by that point you've made $$$ anyway...)
If anyone is looking to grab a few domains, but is not ready to commit to a host/dns provider yet, I suggest you check out soa.granitecanyon.com.
They let you create your own A, CNAME, and MX records, so you can register through any registrar you want, and if you're without DNS, have them point at the granitecanyon set up for DNS resolution. This has saved me many a time.
register.com censors domain names containing certain text strings. I ran a little experiment to test this, and was able to ascertain that they censor after several emails and telephone calls. They won't even tell you you're being censored; you just get a message that says "The domain you have requested is not available." Network Solutions also censors, but at least they tell you when they do so and why.
Do we really want to do business with a company that limits what we can say? I suggest going with a smaller company that doesn't consider itself a guardian of our morality.
"You done taken a wrong turn."
-Bill McKinney, in Deliverance
I registered a domain with TotalNIC.net they have a web/email interface for changing all your contacts, and everything went down smoothly. I paid via CC, the fee was $35 for two years. I then used tzo.com to dynamically house my IP address; since I am still stuck with a 56k PPP connection.
Now I get mail to my linux router box via qmail. Everything works great.
-d9