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Alternative Registrars to GoDaddy?
Futurepower(R) wrote in to ask for your suggestions about reliable domain name registrars. With GoDaddy, the one-time favorite registrar, suspending domains based on the wishes of the Irish High Court, and 'requests' from MySpace, is it any wonder that people are starting to lose faith in it? A word of warning from the last article linked in the last sentence: "(GoDaddy) reserves the right to terminate your access to the services at any time, without notice, for any reason whatsoever." Chilling words from a domain name registrar. So what registrars would you recommend for people looking to replace GoDaddy, and how would you suggest they go about transferring their domains in a hassle-free manner?
I was having some issues with GoDaddy and have been slowly migrating my domains to DynDNS.com. I'd used them in the past for dynamic DNS stuff (heck, what Linux user didn't at some point?), but didn't realize until recently that they were a full blown registrar. Their website is easy to use, their technical staff are knowledgeable, helpful and polite, and I've had an excellent experience with them so far. They're more expensive than GoDaddy ($15/year for most domains), but I think the extra service and attention to detail is worth it. I'd rather pay a little extra and support a good company.
You REALLY have to ask alternatives for GoDaddy? That's some hell of a marketing.
Hell, personally, i wouldn't touch GoDaddy with a long pole even! And always thought that way.
Reason is obvious: They don't convey trust and technological excellency.
But what they have apparently got right is marketing, wouldn't have thought one would need to EVEN ask for alternatives to
GoDaddy and yet know what registrar stands for.
And no, i am not trolling or trying to be flamebait.
As for alternative places to register domains, some are:
- Enom
- Joker
- Mydomain
- DirectI
- RegisterFly
and huge amount of big players i can't remember right now
Pulsed Media Seedboxes
http://www.namepros.com/registerindex.php
f ree-speech+friendly/2100-1025_3-6155614.html
and
http://news.com.com/Survey+Are+domain+registrars+
I used pagesgarden.com (hosting and registration). They are awesome. After receiving complaints from the corporate hoards about my gripe site (sig) they politely informed the lawyers that they are a "common carrier" and would be happy to shut down my domain, after they are properly served with court orders, in person, by a law enforcement or court official. They also provided my contact e-mail to the lawyers and slapped my hand about the bogus whois and suggested a privacy service if I was concerned. At no time was my domain suspended or locked, and at no time did I lose connectivity to the internet.
;-)
Add to that the one time I had issues with e-mail account setups in C-panel and the tech team had it resolved in under 30 minutes. I'm a loyal customer
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
Gandi at www.gandi.net is a French registrar that is fantastic, and has the best contract of any registrar. No bullshit suspensions or any of that nonsense.
Gandi is an excellent place to go. They aren't as cheap as GoDaddy, but they are a heck of a lot friendlier to deal with, and they allow you a lot of flexibility. They have a new XML API, and they support a lot of causes, including Debian.
Did you ever notice that *nix doesn't even cover Linux?
Last I checked Gandi.net offered by far the best terms. Not in terms of money (close, though!) but in terms of recognising the customers rights.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
I had been using GKG.Net, as it was a Slashdot darling in this kind of story 5 or 6 years ago. Things turned bad when I let one of my names go a couple days past the expiration date. I had never had that be a big deal before (I had that happen using DomainMonger and paying a few days late was never a big issue, but their prices had become double that of the competition). GKG, however, demanded $60 in addition to the cost of the domain renewal fee, saying that 3 different people in their organization had to work on the request. They would only take the $60 as a money order, too, which struck me as incredibly shady. Since I had taken a year and a half off to study, I didn't have money to frivolously throw away on domain extortion, so I let it go and thought I'd just register it when it dropped off. No such luck, and for the past 2 years some squatters in Vancouver have had it.
Since then, I have been using VoxDomains and it has been a good experience. $6.95 domains, and when I forgot the password to my account and wanted to make sure a payment got through, it was no problem to contact a representative and get the payment posted. When one of my domains expired with VoxDomains, they had the domain redirect to a "please pay us" page, and when I paid them the regular domain registration fee, everything turned out fine.
Been using them for a while now, I'm very happy with them. If you're looking for other services you may be out of luck, they really don't do much OTHER then registrar and DNS service, but then thats what attracted me to them in the first place. (I like it when a company does one thing well, rather then doing 500 things badly.)
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates