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Ranking The Domain Name Registrars
Thinking of buying a domain name? You may be interested to learn that at least one registrar will only let you lease your name, and also that you'll be signing different agreements, depending on which registrar you use. You might want to browse the
Domain Name Buyer's Guide,
a new site which
rates
the (directly-ICANN-approved) registrars according to both price and whether their contracts are consumer-friendly. (Incidentally, Chris Truax, the lawyer who represented
Etoy
in its domain-name fiasco with eToys, helped build this site.)
I've been quite pleased with joker.com and their price is reasonable.
Unfortunatelly, they are not rating CORE and TUCOWS registrars yet... And they are usually the least expensive ones.
I like the site a lot (hope it doesn't get Slashdotted because I noticed that it uses Frontpage elements on its pages), but I have a few problems with it:
1. It uses too many graphics (a no-no if you're being billed based on bandwidth)
2. There's animated GIF's (they aren't bad because of the Unisys stuff, but these particular ones take your attention off the rest of the registrars.) Unless this is what they were trying to achieve in the first place.
On another note this site deserves a good look. These rankings will almost gurantee that you'll find the registrar you're looking for.
US businesses that currently accept chip and PIN/signature
Man, I had my domain stolen under NetSol, and the bastards took two weeks to give it back. All some idiot had to do to take it was send out an email. To get it back I had to give my drivers license, 20 faxes, numerous phone calls, e-mails, and lost hair. Bastards deserve that one star.Sharkey
www.badassmofo.com
After all these years, I finally have a guide to help me squat efficiently! Ha!
That is worrying indeed and the very suggestion and had me worrying to check the registrar I used for my badtech.com site (looks safe thankfully). This is very scary however, if you acutualy make a success of a domain I guess they could just take it back when the lease expires and auction it to the highest bidder, nasty! This kind of thing won't work against trademark names but it could really hurt the smaller web publishers if it became common place. The registrar I used 'Name Secure reserves the right to revoke your domain name at any time, without notice' which is a little scary although I would guess they would need to supply justification, although this reinforces the need to read the small print.
While this is somewhat offtopic, I would avoid RegisterFree. It's been about a month and I still have not recieved the key to update the database with my nameserver information. I've asked them for it twice and have as of yet recieved nothing.
I just got hit with a $29.00 late fee for being one day late for a $35.00 renual payment. That's almost 100% of my yearly charge!
You have been warned...
If you used another domain registrar, use their feedback form and tell them about your experience so they can include your registrar on the list.
They are VERY interested in the legal aspects, and having seen how they ranked NSI, I may just be switching registrars.
Anyone else get paranoid over the little ownership and transferrence clauses? I sure as heck am not interested giving someone else the right to revoke my domain!
They have left out all of the CORE registrars and all of the OpenSRS folx, which are, IMHO, some of the best price/performance registrars out there.
Nobody on that list comes close in price to some of the registrars affiliated with the missing organizations: Joker.com domains go for $12.00/yr. and the OpenSRS guys wholesale names at $10/yr.
Anyway...just thought I'd point that out.
while the website here is an EXTREMELY good thing-- something that should have been made a LONG time ago-- it still is very incomplete.
.com, .net, and .org, totally ignoring everything else.
.nu, .to, whatever-- may be very good for some people. I for one registered a .cx domain (see webpage and email adress above) because i liked the price (i haven't found anything comparable in .com, .net or .org areas) and have been very happy with it so far. But other than .cx, i don't really know what country TLDs are open. There is no list i am aware of that lists all the TLDs along with who you register that TLD with, how much they charge, are people outside of that country legally allowed to register domains there, are there any odd legal rules (i. e. is it possible that you could have your domain name revoked at will), or even WHERE those domains are registered. Where do you register a .my domain? (malasia, right? no?) Because damned if i know. It isn't nic.my.
.int? (international. i think. i think the U.N. controls it but i'm not sure.) did you even know there was a .int? (i'm only asking because i want unsigned.int or l.int.. i don't think i'm legally allowed to have them though :)) .int isn't important, but it's indicative of the fact nobody really knows what's going on with the TLDs anymore. At least nobody you're likely to ever get to talk to, or for that matter come across on IRC/USENET..
.net .org] domains, would be an amazingly valuable resource. i hope that's what www.domainnamebuyersguide.com evolves into. At the moment they only offhandedely mention that country TLDs exist in the FAQ. As far as i'm aware, .us isn't even MENTIONED on the site anywhere. i thought everyone was supposed to be switching to .us..?
i say this because it is completely restricted to
Some of those other-country TLDs--
and what about
Anything ranking or even _talking about_ non-international domains, and comparing them side by side with the international [.com
At any rate the domain name buyer's guide shows great promise and i wish them luck..
-mcc-baka
INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY IS THEFT
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
OOG BACK AFTER PASSING OUT FROM DRINKING BINGE, ALTHOUGH HAVE BAD HANGOVER!!! BUT OOG THEN FIND COOL GREEN SEVEN LEAF PLANT GROWING OUTSIDE CAVE!!! OOG HAVE MUCH FUN SMOKING PLANT!!! BUT OOG START FEEL DIZZY NOW...
arrrr... whoa a domain rankings site... that's grooovvyyy, HEHE! But like, hey man, it's about time that someone rated all the domain registrars, cuz thats groovy. Like this one time, HEHE, I was totally gone, and I was thinking about getting me a domain and stuff. And dude, I knew I needed to like, register a domain from someone, but there were so many choices, man!!!! It totally blew my mind! Like there's NSI, tucows, CORE, Domain Discover, and all those places, and I'm all thinking... what's a dude supposed to do? There were, like, waaayyyy too many options, man!! And anyway, I started out all stoked about this domain thing, but with all those registrar places, I couldn't make up my mind! So like, this potentially groovilicious thang gets all bogus because I couldn't make up my mind. So it's definitely quite radical of this dude to write this domain registrar review site. I just went and saw the article and I was all, "WHOA man, that's awesome, HEHEHE!!" Well like dude, I think I need to go repack the pipe cuz it's kinda getting low and stuff... HEHE! But like, that site is cooooooolll, HEHEHEHE...
ARGGGHH!!! WHY OOG HEAD HURT AGAIN??? OOG'S EYES ALL RED AND BLOODSHOT!!! HMM, OOG HAVE MUNCHIES NOW!!! OOG GO EAT NINE BAGS OF FRITOS IN CAVE!!!
OOG THE OPEN SOURCE CAVEMAN!!! OOG BREAK HEAD WITH OPEN SOURCE CD!!!
They claim to offer "free domain name registration" but they they give you the "use" of a domain name of your choice for a year and you're also required to have a streaming advertisement on the site. You MUST provide your name, address, age, occupation, employment, income, etc. to any direct marketers of the company's choice. You must accept all email, mail, telephone, and direct solicitations to your Web site and at the end of a year you either have to give up your service, get a new domain name through them, or pay for the domain name and pay any transfer fees and taxes. Plus, you agree to 'defend' and 'hold harmless' the service. Which means: if you ever do get sued, you have to pay all of their legal expenses and costs. You also can't sue them, even if it IS their fault."
flatrabbit,
peripheral visionary
"Never wrestle with a pig, you both get dirty and the pig likes it."
I wonder if MS got slapped with this fine. In fact, I wonder what happened since the check was supposedly auctioned off on ebay. Anyone has any news?
(1) Has anyone ever been refused consent to assign a domain name?
(2) I understand that in many jurisdictions, nonassignability provisions in contracts (other than contracts for personal services) are enforceable only if they are "reasonable." Does anyone have any intelligence on whether an assignability clause is "reasonable" under the law of any jurisidiction? (That is to say, has anyone ever heard of a court considering this issue? I suspect that most registrars provide for mandatory arbitration in their contracts, and that consequently courts would not have the opportunity to consider this issue.)
(3) Aside from alleviation of chronic corporatist paranoia, what benefit do registrars hope to realize from these clauses? (Put another way, what disaster do they hope to prevent?)
1) Taxation if domains are found to be property and to have value.
2) Liability for improper use. Do they really want to supervise every single domain name? If it is their property, they might be liable for its use, where providing a registration service where the user putatively owns the name might not. The NIC got sued by the AG of Pennsylvania a couple years back for issuing a couple white supremist sites. How much better if they "owned" the domain! ;-)
3) Competition in registration makes this a lease of what? If any service can register the name, how is it that they own anything which might be leased?
In any event, this is a bit of creativity that may cost them. Live by the sword, die by the sword kind of thing...
Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes "Who Keeps the Keepers Themselves" ~ Juvenal
Why can't I own a domain name? Why do I have to lease one from a registrar? If I can provide all the hardware and software necessary to host and DNS a domain, what am I paying a registrar for?
I remember a while back, several people were unhappy (and rightly so) because NetSol had bobbled on releasing their domains to new registrars they wanted to transfer them to -- apparently merely out of spiteful perversity.
Has this situation been cleared up? Does anyone have datapoints either way? I have a couple domains I'd like to shift, but *I do not want to lose them*.
Maybe an advance letter to David Holtzman?
Cheers,
-- jra
-----
I use Register.com for all my domain names. They have an excellent online control panel that lets you add level 1 and level 3 subdomains, no problems nor confusions like Network Solutions.
Also, they have FREE DNS services, so all you have to worry about is IP addresses. So easy!
Also, one time my DNS table got corrupted, but they promptly fixed it.
Network Solutions can kiss my ass. They charge extra for everything, and also make things overly complicated.
"...we are moving toward a Web-centric stage and our dear PC will be one of
EverCode
I know what you really want to know: What did DOMAINNAMEBUYERSGUIDE.com choose for their registrar?
The answer: names4ever.com.
OTOH, I'm not sure I'd trust someone who did their page in frontpage to tell me what domain name registrar to use.
Tita-nic.com tries to list the best options available :-)
to easily move your domains to better registrars .
it's point and click and only takes about five days.
your domains will be safer and you save money at the same time.
good bye NSI/Network Solutions/crooks
kind regards philippe, http://A-Z-Internet.com
I see a lot of bytching about the site's presentation, and especially about the fact it was done in Frontpage. Don't like it? Do something about it! We're all closet web designers, and while many of us should stay in said closet, someone could whip out a 200% improvement in a couple of hours. So toss in a little elbow grease and send em a concept page. If one of you is half as hot as most of the complaintants act, they'll be floored..
.sig: Now legally binding!
The great domain name speculator and fighter for free speach, :
"domainiac" Russ Smith, opened a site where he registers
and transfers domains for you to OpenSRS.org
GoodByeNSI.com or DumpNSI.com
You can find the complete list of accredited and operational, accredited and non-operational, and pre-accredited registrars here.
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
Use the Window-target: _top header in HTTP. With a CGI, put it before the Content-type header, or with PHP3 just use:
header("Window-target: _top");
Again, it works fine in NS4.*, but it doesn't appear to work with MSIE 5, at least not at my school. Maybe the JavaScript solution could be the MSIE solution.
the real at&t mix
Benefiting squatters who want to own a name for the long haul but who want to make some money off it in the mean time
Giving up all sorts of rights associated with ownership in exchange for what may be a smaller annual fee.
As someone already pointed out, anyone would have to be insane to market a name only to see it revert to its owner after it became popular and the lease expired. Maybe non-commercial non-competitive obscure sites may not suffer as much, but then what are they doing buying their own domain name in the first place?
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
How do the different registrars keep from leasing or selling the same name to different people?
What if Bob tried to register nameofsomething.com on Friday through register.com and Christina tried to register nameofsomething.com the same day through another registrar? Which does it go to. And what prevents the registrars from double registering domain names? Is there a central power that assigns them all?
Starskita
!
Starskita
Starskita
!
Not yet, no. But resorting to mis-spelling words in order to get a domain name is surely a sign that things have gone too far?
It's the fencing of common land all over again. What was previously held to be a public realm becomes property, to the benefit of almost nobody.
The law doth punish the website author,
Who builds a site at a domain with a name a bit like another,
But leaves the greater felon loose,
Who buys up all the domains and puts nothing there just to earn a quick buck off authors who want to build something at a domain they would previously have got for a reasonable price.
Hmm... scanning's not quite there yet. Needs work.
--
This comment was brought to you by And Clover.
...what's a good site that reviews web site _hosts_? I already registered a domain name and have it bounce to a different host so the user doesn't see the domain name in the URL (and thus bookmarks the wrong URL). This summer, when that service runs out, I'm going to switch to a dedicated host. I have neither the equipment nor the desire to host it myself.
My site is fairly small -- less than 10MB all together, no cgi's or Java. It doesn't do a whole lot of traffic. E-mail forwarding is a definite plus, but I don't need a buttload of POP accounts. What's a good site to compare hosting plans? Anyone have some personal favorites? I'm looking for something preferably comfortably below $10/mo.
For more information, click here.
When you register a domain name, it's not all about price, though a lot of people like to hammer on the very obvious fact that some of the more established companies (eg, network solutions) charge fees that are far in excess of other entities. You must also keep in mind that you are paying for a service - and look at what you plan on getting out of that service.
As a web hosting company, we register a lot of domains in a month. On top of that, we transfer many domains from other hosting companies to our servers. Since the vast majority of currently hosted domains are registered through network solutions, this is a very simple task for us. So long as we host a certain number of domains registered through them, we have a dedicated contact at netsol. What does this mean? If there are ANY problems with either a domain modification or registration request, there is a super nice woman at the other end of a telephone who is just sitting there waiting to help us out. She has the authority to correct about 99% of the problems that we encounter in our daily business. As a host this is one of the most difficult items we face on a daily basis, and this is an invaluable service.
The buyer's guide is a pretty nice site, but this is definately tailored to the individual domain buyer. However, at this point in time the individual is not the largest domain consumer -- it is still the ISP/IPP (even though we may do it on behalf of the individual). As such, what remains very important is the service that one can expect as a bulk buyer. While netsol continues to remain comepetitive and friendly to the bulk buyer (and they certainly have the resources to throw at this segment) they will continue to remain king.
(At least until we/other bulk registrants, get our act together and either use open srs or totally get ourselves going as our own registrar - either of which still require a rather serious investment on our part).
Would it be off topic to ask how to add a third level domain with NSI? Anyone else ever done this? If so how did you go about it?
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
After the story I read in which the guy tried to change to another registrar and NS closed his account and promptly sold his domain to somebody else before the other registrar could plug it in, I had no stomach for doing anything other than paying them off and praying they wouldn't botch _that_ up. I'm nervous because I paid them by check when they're expecting web-credit-card payments! It's pretty sad when you can't trust the buggers to be paid off and do NOTHING... we'll see. I hope other people are ready to put some heat on them. I don't feel comfortable trifling with them because of how badly they could hose me. Color me extorted ;P
I mean, doesn't ICANN set out the rules by which someone can have a name?
I mean, technicall, you don't 'buy' the name. it's not a tangible thing. You don't 'lease' it for the same reason.
What you do is pay for a service that says name.com will be listed in the root nameservers wiht appropriate records for a period of time set forth in the contract. nothing more.
Well.... DNS hosting is not part of registration, it's an added service. With normal registration, you must run your own dns server, as it has always been.
What do you mean... won't let you point aliases to IP addresses? There is no such thing as an 'alias' in DNS. There is CNAME, where one record points to another.. by name, not IP.
If you mean point IP addresses to names.. that's reverse DNS, and is completely not under thier control.. it's under the control of the ISP who provides the IP space..
OTOH I'm not so sure about the advice on the site - the section "what about NET and ORG domains, do I want them as well as COM?" is awful! The namespace is confused enough already without people taking names which don't represent what they are. Like, how on earth is 'hotsexygirls' valid as a value-adder in the .net domain?!
Anyway. Feedback left about one of my domains. And boy it was not a nice experience!
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
~Tim
--
~Tim
--
Rushing on down to the circle of the turn
Obviously you have been lucky. I can tell you that register.coms systems are not at all reliable. I have registered several domains with them and the last one (of course I don't use them any more..) ended up being owned by someone wanting to sell it to me for 2000$. The shitty thing is that I registered the domain 1 month before the other guy but since register.coms systems couldn't handle the registration (since they are poorly programmed) and they were not aware of the problem (they are poorly sysadmined), I got like 10 different excuses from their helpdesk and finally they wanted me to send a letter to their president! F*ck that I say. To put it in short: I lost the domain ONLY because of register.coms poor systems. I could even edit the billing info in the ManageMyDomain-service but still the domain had been registered by someone else(who was smart enough not to use register.com).
I recommend you not to register any domains that are critical to you with them. They can't handle their systems.
I don't mean to quibble, but this seems like a pretty unlikely scam. It depends on the unlikely existence of both (1) a scammer who acquires a domain name worth something and (2) a purchaser both flush enough to purchase the domain name and naïve enough not to obtain either adequate documentation of the purchase or actual confirmation of the name's transfer from the registrar. Further, it would seem that there are other ways to address this potential issue than a blanket nonassignability term.