Slashdot Mirror
Who is the Best Registrar? (take 2)
cardozo asks: "Since my registrar recently did a bad customer service job with me, and their site wasn't all that easy to use, I'm in the market for a new registrar. Slashdot has responded to this question in the distant past, but the world has changed since Feb 2000!. Price is important, but customer service is too. Features are less important to me, but I can imagine that having email forwarding, etc. would be nice. So who do you think is the best registrar?"
Easy to use, a 24x7 support line that actual has a real person on it, and the best part $8.95/yr.
I have been using Gandi for several years and been very happy with their service.
They offer domain registration in .com/.org/.net/.biz/.info/.name/.be for EUR12 a year (about $14 dollars, lately). That includes optional free web redirection, email redirection, DNS hosting, and secondary DNS. Almost all administration is automated on their website and very easy to use. I have zero complaints and nothing but compliments for them, and have been recommending them to friends for low-cost, high-quality domain registration.
From their site:
-XDG
Dotster...It's $14.95 a year (discounts if you do more than one year), and they've done a fine job for me.
I love joker.com - I use their hosted nameservers + web forwarding to link a number of domains to a single CNAME'd domain to a no-ip.org address (yikes).
No real issues in the 4(?) odd years I've been with them.
æeee!
Well, you might have received spam from Gandi, or you might have just received spam that *appeared* to be from Gandi at first glance. You might want to read this and see if it applies to you. I've certainly had no trouble with them, and I use multiple domain registrars.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
I have been very pleased with register.com. They are a real company, established and based in New York. Not some fly by night registar.
They provide a full array to tools, ex: DNS, MX, all that you need for free.
You would want to register www.gtracer.com. Then, create dns records like so: (if you're using a registrar that does dns for you, do it w/them. otherwise, set up your own dns server and point your domain @ your dns server thru the registrar)
www.gtracer.com A
gtracer.com MX 10 mail.gtracer.com
And then you'd just want to configure your mailserver on whatever machine is answering to that IP so that it routes everything @gtracer.com to your user account (in sendmail, you'd use the virtusertable, and configure gtracer.com and mail.gtracer.com in the local-host-names. There's probably something similar in pegasus).
Place sig here.
Ok -- here's the steps:
- First, register a domain name. godaddy.com would do nicely. This will cost you ten bucks a year (prepay for a couple of years).
- Next, you need DNS services. Here there is a problem: (1) if your IP isn't really static and (2) you need 2 (two) different machines serving DNS. So go to someone who can solve both problems. dyndns.org would do nicely. Give money to dyndns.org to do your DNS (you want CUSTOM service) -- they will give you the IP addresses of the DNS servers, and you supply those to godaddy.com. dnydns.org used to have a one-time contribution to do the dns (30 bucks?).
(3) Any time your IP address changes, simply go to the dyndns.org website and update your record. If you have a DHCP assigned IP, there are scripts that will automatically update dyndns.org whenever it changes.
And you are off to the races... your own email, web hosting, whatever. Total cost: ~$50US for two years.
Ratboy.
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
Best for international - godaddy.com
Worst for international - icann.totalnic.net
Best for UK - easily.co.uk
Totalnic lock all your domains so you have to write to Australia (snail mail!) to request them to be unlocked before transferring them away.
Godaddy will not charge you if a transfer to them is unsuccessful (e.g. when I tried to transfer from Totalnic to Godaddy and found that my domains were locked!).
Easily makes it pretty easy to deal with co.uk domains - not all the crappy paperwork of Nominet.
#include <sig.h>
I'll second them for a recommendation.
We have 30+ domains with them. They make it very easy to keep track of all of the domains you have. When I log through my technical contact login (They offer a separate login for each contact, Tech, Admin, Owner, and Billing), it lists all of the domains I'm entered as a tech contact for.
This means I can administer all of my domains at once.
Best of all, separate logins means that each of my customers (the "Owner" contacts) has a login that they can use to get into their domains and change their current contact information, as well as keep tabs on the status of their domain (when will it expire, etc).
I don't know if they have a phone contact, but they generally respond to e-mails within 15 minutes or so during business hours.
In addition to sending reminders to the administrators, they send a reminder 5 days before expiration to the technical contact, just in case the admin isn't available to respond.
When you do go into the renewal form, it displays all of the domains you own, and when they are about to expire. You can theoretically renew a batch of them at once, but since most of my records have different owner contact records, I renew them individually. However, for someone who maintains many domain names with identical contacts, this would be ideal.
Also, they're only $13.50 per year, which isn't as cheap as some of these other services, but beats the pants off of Verisign.
Karma: Chevy Kavalierma.
All prices excluding VAT, 1 euro ~= 1.17 USD
Disclaimer: I'm an happy paying customer and switched all my email and DNS to OVH a month ago. No other relationship with OVH or OVH people.
Disclaimer 2: already posted in another /. discussion about webmail.
Laurent
I'm a fan of Dotster. I've been using them as a registrar and domain server for years and I have no complaints. At $15/year, it's pretty reasonably priced. They seem to be under pretty constant renovations in a good way, updating services and their interface as time goes on. (Unlike some companies that grow stagnant.)
"I'll say it again for the logic-impaired." -- Larry Wall.
I love http://www.reg.ca/.
They are cheap, and it's easy to get in touch with a real, live human being if problems arise.
You need two things: A domain name, and DNS servers.
The first is easy, plop down $8 with godaddy.com for any old domain name.
The second is a little bit more complicated. You need (at least) two seperate machines that can act as nameserver for your domain. If your IP address is really static, then you can use that machine as one of your nameservers. The way this works is you enter the nameserver's machine domain name (e.g. "ns1.yourdomain.com") and IP address in the whois registry. Normally, you would use a nameserver of a completely seperate domain, and in this case you don't have to list anything special. But in the case of e.g. "foobar.com" with nameserver "ns1.foobar.com", obviously you can't do a DNS lookup on "ns1.foobar.com" in order to resolve "foobar.com" addresses -- it's a chicken-and-egg thing. So you enter this information in the whois registry.
Another alternative is to use the services of a third-party DNS server. One popular one is zoneedit.com. They are free if the number of queries is below some threshold, otherwise you buy credits and "spend" them based on the load. Alternatively, you can run your own primary authoritative nameserver (as above) and then use zoneedit in "slave" mode, where they pull a zone transfer from your primary nameserver and act as secondary. This has the advantage that you are in complete control over the zone (since you run the main nameserver) but you also have some degree of redundancy in that the zoneedit.com servers (which are theoretically very bulletproof) will still answer queries if your host is down or unreachable. There are a couple of other free DNS services out there, for example granitecanyon.com. A google search will tell more. You may also be able to obtain this service from your registrar, for a little bit more money.
So once you've decided how you're going to do the DNS servers, you just add an A record that points the domain name to your IP address, and possibly a CNAME or additional A records for any various subdomains, eg www.yourdomain, ftp.yourdomain, etc. For mail you simply add a MX record for yourdomain.com that points to the IP address of your machine, and make sure that you have a mail server listening on port 25. In a pinch you can even skip the MX record, as the spec says that if there is no MX record the MTA should try the IP address of the A record for the domain of the recipient.