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?

RegistryRocket.com

Well, there's a small annoyance, that if you get a domain, they default-direct it to one of those generic squat pages until the first change perks down, and it has an expire time of about a week. So rotate your dns servers in that case.

Any rate, I bought from them through a reseller, who a friend of mine was using (I covered his domain renewal, then bought a domain of my own), other than this, seems to be not bad, not much trickier than the dyndns way and a lot cheaper than buying a domain through them or through my ISP, the $9.96 I paid was prolly comparable to GoDaddy...or not much more...

-uso.

Re:RegistryRocket.com

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

Gandi.net

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.

Re:Gandi.net: $15.63

But Sally Struthers says that I can use that 5 cents a day to solve world hunger.....ethics? or business? Tough call.

Layne

I'm very happy with dyndns.com

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.

Absolutely

I used their free dynamic services, and now they've earned my business long-term. Great registrar, no gimmicks, no games. Even if it's a few dollars a year above some of the other places, it's absolutely worth it.

Re:1and1

I'd steer clear of 1and1. While I don't know if this is indicative of a pattern in dealing with problems, they cut off Spocko's Brain [spockosbrain.com], a weblog, due to a nastygram from ABC regarding an interesting radio show controversy. Since the purpose of avoiding GoDaddy is to get away from these knee-jerk responses, I'd not recommend 1and1 based on these recent actions. You can check the blog for information on what happened in more detail.

Re:1and1

I don't have a lot of dirt myself on 1and1, but I used to work for a good-sized hosting company, and whenever a customer asked about buying a domain from 1and1, my boss would crap out a community of small woodland animals. He didn't necessarily hate them, but he was pretty convinced that they were a load of bad news, and it was corporate policy to do whatever we could to keep the customer away from that registrar.

Also, we'd get lots of testimonials from old 1and1 hosting customers who had venerable horror-stories, complete with "site offline for 5 days+", "wont answer my emails" and "took my money and ran" situations.

1and1 can pound sand

MysticOne is absolutely right. 1and1 will never get my business because of the way they caved to the cryptofascists at Disney/ABC. I don't care if Disney is the 800lb gorilla, you look out for your customers and you don't pull a registration just because you got one letter from a lawyer. I doubt they spent 5 minutes looking into the matter. As soon as they saw "Disney/ABC" on the letterhead, they were reaching for the plug.

And thanks, MysticOne,for telling me about this Spocko's Brain thing. Living in the cold Midwest, I forget there are also people on the coasts that are trying to stand up. I sent Spocko a few bucks just for being a stone in the shoe of those who would threaten liberty.

Oh, and I am happy with dynDNS, they surprised me with their service and strong policies.

Vs. NetSol

I'm still paying the unbelievable price of $35/year with NetSol, and was just about to effect a mass transfer to GoDaddy last week; certain events have gotten me to stop and think: NetSol is highway-robbery, but they're stable as hell.

Re:I've heard of this new startup...

If you have to tell people it's funny, then it's not funny... Sorry.

Who needs a domain name?

Just use your ip address! It's like a phone number, and people memorize those all the time.

one more to avoid

For what it's worth, a group of us on Web Hosting Talk were chatting about the Godaddy problems, and someone from Dynadot came by to support Godaddy and state that they do the same. You can see the start of that here:

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=569 379#post4265087 [webhostingtalk.com]

So if you're leaving Godaddy for their interference with domain names, then you surely want to also avoid Dynadot.

WoW! That's some marketing!

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

Support userfriendly.org

I have so far had good luck with register4less, http://uf.r4l.com/ [r4l.com]. I mainly started using them as a way to support User Friendly.

I had an interesting problem with GoDaddy. I had a number of domains registered with Domain Direct, and had good luck with them, though I started to find them expensive, so I started registering domains through GoDaddy. I had a domain expire that was originally on GoDaddy, but didn't really care about it, then about 8 months later I wanted a domain to do some testing, and figured I'd re-new my old domain. When I tried to renew through GoDaddy, they said that it was on hold, and it would cost $$$ extra to release it, tried some other domain registers, and they said GoDaddy had locked the name. A month later, I checked on it using register4less.com, and it was available, so I renewed through them. I then checked a different old domain name on Register4less, and Domain Direct, both showed the domain available. Went to GoDaddy, and it was held, due to it being expired, and would need extra $$$ to purchase it.

I will never use GoDaddy to register another domain again.

Surveys from a couple of sites

http://www.namepros.com/registerindex.php [namepros.com]

and

http://news.com.com/Survey+Are+domain+registrars+f ree-speech+friendly/2100-1025_3-6155614.html [com.com]

GANDI

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

Gandi [gandi.net] 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 [gandi.net], including Debian.

Just look for controversial websites

Just use whois to see where controversial websites are registered. For instance:

• godhatesfags.com is registered through Network Solutions
• nambla.org is registered through Tucows

You get the idea.

Nearlyfreespeech.net

http://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/ [nearlyfreespeech.net] -- these guys are the best. Check out their site, you'll understand.

Avoid Yahoo Domains!

Whatever you do, no matter how good a deal they offer, NEVER register a domain through Yahoo.

I had problems with my Yahoo Domains account's email (web service was fine) - basically 1 out of every 5 emails sent from my Yahoo purchased domain's account would not be delivered to Yahoo or Hotmail addresses. I'd get a message 2 days later saying hotmail.com couldn't be found, or yahoo.com couldn't be found. I went back and forth with Yahoo support. Eventually they told me the addresses of my friends (the Yahoo ones, at least) didn't exist or weren't valid Yahoo accounts. These were people who regularly send me mail. So I made a test free Yahoo account of my own and got the same result - sometimes mail I sent to the account didn't go through and I didn't get any clue that something was wrong until a nondelivery message came 2 days later. Again customer support told me the address didn't exist, so I sent them email FROM that address, and then they completely stopped responding to all customer support mails I sent from that point on. I was amazed.

So I decided to switch my domain to Godaddy, the registrar I have been using recently. I made a transfer purchase order through Godaddy's site and all I needed was the authorization code for my domain from Yahoo.

And thus began the hell that is trying to transfer a domain away from Yahoo.

Buried deep down in Yahoo's Website Services help pages were the directions to contact Melbourne IT, the registrar Yahoo uses to purchase domains. (Yes, Yahoo is not a registrar.) I emailed Melbourne IT asking for my code. They said to contact the reseller. Yahoo sent me email that I should contact Melbourne IT. Another person at Yahoo said I should cancel my Yahoo Domains account and they'd send me the information I needed to login to Melbourne IT's site and get my code. This sounded dubious.

But searching online revealed that's what other people had ended up doing. So I tried to change my domain's contact email address to a temp gmail address, so that when Yahoo canceled my account they wouldn't send email to the just-canceled email service. Yahoo's contact address change form returned, "Unable to modify contact information at this time. Please try again later," no matter when I tried using it. Finally I got someone at Yahoo to change the address for me. I cancelled my Yahoo account.

True to their word, Yahoo sent the login information for Melbourne IT to my domain's contact address after closing my website services account. I logged into Melbourne IT's site and there was no way to request the authorization code other than entering a basic help ticket. I did, and got no response. After a few days I sent another request. Again, no response.

One day I was reading complaints on message boards about Melbourne IT and saw a link to a login URL I hadn't seen before. I logged in there and had access to to my domain's code! Apparently Melbourne IT's support pages are partitioned with no links between each other... I sent the auth code to Godaddy and they began the transfer. Four days later, Melbourne IT responded to my original request for the authorization codes.

(I have omitted the dozens of useless exchanges with tech support people asking me for information I had already given to one of their coworkers. There is nothing more frustrating - and Yahoo was really bad at this - of starting over in a process because the person who responds to your message today doesn't understand what their coworker began two days previous.)

Total time to transfer a domain from Yahoo Domains: 1 1/2 months

VoxDomains.com

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.

GoDaddy Alternatives -- Try NoDaddy.Com

Just a few days ago, I launched a noncommercial site dedicated to this exact purpose -- encouraging and helping people move away from GoDaddy. The site is at NoDaddy.Com [nodaddy.com] (I'm sure Bob Parsons loves the domain name ;).

I launched the site after GoDaddy shut down my domain SecLists.Org [seclists.org], as noted in this /. article summary. The site includes a list of alternative registrars that readers have recommended. It is rather sparse on details right now, but I'm working on that. I'll go through all your comments in this article tomorrow to fish out good ideas for the registrar section of the site. I'm trying to fill up the site as much as possible before GoDaddy's big SuperBowl ads air on Sunday. We are currently seeking a volunteer to set up and run the NoDaddy forums -- write me if you're interested. We're also looking for "NoDaddy girl" models, but perhaps Slashdot isn't the best place to recruit for that :).

Just today, CNET News.Com posted an article where they interviewed many registrars about there takedown policies [domainnamewire.com]. Unfortunately, many registrars refused or didn't bother to respond. Of those who did, the authors "found that the French registrar Gandi.net and New Orleans-based DirectNIC offered the most extensive guarantees against unnecessary domain name suspension."

-Fyodor
Insecure.Org [insecure.org]

EasyDNS

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.)

NearlyFreeSpeech.NET

I use NearlyFreeSpeech.NET [nearlyfreespeech.net] for my domain registration. They're a web host, but they offer great domain name prices ($7.50 for .com/.net/.org). If you plan on using all of the crappy bells and whistles that come with most registrars (like email forwarding and WHOIS privacy), it'll cost a little more -- $0.01/day for WHOIS privacy, and $0.02/day for email. So that's $3.65 a year and $7.30 a year. But the email forwarding is nice; they let you create unlimited addresses that can 1) forward to any address 2) POST the message to a CGI script (!) 3) bounce messages or 4) discard messages, and you can select any of those options as a catchall.

Their hosting is also wonderful for personal sites that don't get a ton of traffic. (It's probably good for larger sites, but I only host my personal website on it right now.) They charge a flat $1.00/GB for transfer and $0.01/MB/month for storage. Bandwidth is available in discounted "buckets" that contain a certain amount and expire after a certain date. Storage might be available in a similar way soon. MySQL is $0.01/day for the first process, $0.02/day for each extra (normally you only need one), $0.01/day/process for InnoDB, and $0.01/day/process if you're in the top 10% of activity (not likely). They have every CGI language known to man, but of course they don't support things like FastCGI and mod_perl, since FastCGI would require a ton of persistent processes, and mod_perl allows one user to crash the whole server. And their control panel is really simple and intuitive (although they're scrambling to create better reporting/statistics tools).