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'm very happy with dyndns.com

[MysticOne]

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.

enom

[Anonymous Coward]

I am affiliated with enom... because I have had good experiences with them, you might too

one more to avoid

[Anthony Boyd]

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!

[Skal Tura]

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

Re:Vs. NetSol

[Talian]

Threaten to leave. I get my netsol domains renewed for 7.95 a year. Stable, and affordable.

Re:Vs. NetSol

[StarHeart]

NetSol isn't stable in all cases. Don't let them host your domain on their dns servers, unless you like like regular problems.

Surveys from a couple of sites

[imaginaryelf]

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]

Re:RegistryRocket.com

[networkBoy]

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

[iriefrank]

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

[illuminatedwax]

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.

Gandi.net

[Arker]

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.

VoxDomains.com

[ninjaz]

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.

Re:Nearlyfreespeech.net

[CliffSpradlin]

Others do it, but not quite as well as nearlyfreespeech.net. Not only does NFSN forward domain email to wherever you want, but they also receive faxes and letter mail, and let you know when nonspam mail comes in for your domain.

EasyDNS

[Tridus]

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.)

Re:one more to add to the list

[aymanh]

I'm another happy NameCheap [namecheap.com] customer; I have been using their services for around 3 years. Their prices are cheap, and they offer a clean and very usable control panel. In addition, customer support was quick and helpful in the few times I needed it.

See the comment below about GKG.net

[Futurepower(R)]

See this ugly story about GKG.net [slashdot.org].

NearlyFreeSpeech.NET

[ThinkingInBinary]

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).

Re:joker.com

[rueger]

I too used joker.com for years, but have had problems in recent times. Specifically we had an autoforwarded address which suddenly started having long delays in mail delivery.

Turns out according to our ISP (who I do have a lot of faith in) that a significant amount of what comes out of the joker.com mailservers is spam, and joker seems disinclined to do anything about it. Consequently our ISP had been throttling back mail from joker.

I've also found in the last year or so that mail to joker support simply goes unanswered.

I'm moving our domains, and client domains away from joker.

Re:NameCheap.com features?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes they are affiliated with eNom. I have used namecheap for quite a few years and have had only one big issue. When a domain that was no longer under my account had expired (by a long time), the only recourse to contact them is via email (took 24 hours to get a reply) or call the number in their whois (leave a voicemail). Essentially, if you keep your account straight, up to date, and rarely ever have support needs, namecheap is a good fit.

Re:WoW! That's some marketing!

[tverbeek]

That isn't trolling, just pointing out that your reasoning is fundamentally flawed. Some very non-reputable companies spend a lot of money on advertising... quite often because they have bad reputations.