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.

Comments

The Selections...

[kcarnold]

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.

register.com vs. Network Solutions

[yamla]

One of my domains is registered through register.com and the other through Network Solutions.

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.

OpenSRS

[mattdm]

OpenSRS (sponsored by Tucows) is probably the coolest thing out there. $10/year for a domain name ($9 of which goes to NSI). Of course, you then need to do a lot of the work yourself -- they work as a wholesaler, rather than end-user sales. Basically, they make it easy to set yourself up as a registrar. Or, do a search for "OpenSRS" and find some places using their service to do the work for you.

--

Dotster.com

[Julius X]

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

Picking a registrar

[.@.]

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.

Re:Question Regarding DNS

[Anonymous Coward]

You can run your own domain server (but only if you have a static IP!). If this is a Linux/UNIX machine, run BIND on it. List your computer as the primary DNS server, and GraniteCanyon's **2** DNS servers as secondarys (list them both, or GraniteCanyon may delete your domain). Have GraniteCanyon get their domain data from your system ("Create secondary DNS" on their page). You can use Everyone.net (or BigMailBox.com) to do mail forwarding if you don't want to run your own SMTP server (The admin can create several forwarding addresses for a domain, and users can register web-based accounts. But you can always delete user's accounts if they start stealing good names). You can use www.capibara.com if you want free web forwarding. Or you can just run the mail/web servers on your machine.

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 {
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 /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:

@ SOA @ my.email.address. (
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 :) [or any other text]"
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.").