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Alternative Registrars to GoDaddy? 218

Posted by Cliff from the time-to-flee-a-sinking-ship dept.
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?
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Alternative Registrars to GoDaddy? More

Alternative Registrars to GoDaddy?

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  • RegistryRocket.com (Score:5, Interesting)

    by dosius ( 230542 ) <bridget@buric.co> on Saturday February 03, 2007 @01:43AM (#17870328) Journal
    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 (Score:4, Informative)

      by networkBoy ( 774728 ) on Saturday February 03, 2007 @02:34AM (#17870696) Journal
      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 (Score:5, Informative)

      by Arker ( 91948 ) on Saturday February 03, 2007 @02:51AM (#17870774) Homepage
      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.
      • Gandi.net [gandi.net] costs "12,00 Tax Excl. ie. 14,35 incl. tax". That is $15.63 [google.com] today (2007-02-03), almost twice as expensive as the minimum.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by _iris ( 92554 )
        I've used joker.com since 1998 and I have never had any problems with them. They charge $12 per year, but the service is definitely worth it to me.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by bcrowell ( 177657 )
        I used gandi for a while for a couple of domains. The big problem I had with them was that they always seemed to overload their servers. Any time I needed to do anything, like update my contact info or something, it seemed like there was a 50/50 chance that I'd actually be able to do it that day. One domain was expiring, so I switched to a different registrar; unresponsive server, finally got it done after a lot of hassles. The other domain expired this year, and again it required a lot of waiting and retry
    • I don't understand the suggestion. Does Registry Rocket register domains?

      This Registry Rocket?

      "RegistryRocket [hostgator.com] is a customizable e-commerce web page. It is designed as a tool for you to sell domain names. You give your site a name, upload a logo (or not), and set the pricing. We take care of the website hosting, merchant processing and other eNom services. Track sales and watch your account balance grow in your eNom reseller account.Whether this is your permanent e-commerce solution fordomain name sal

  • I'm very happy with dyndns.com (Score:5, Informative)

    by MysticOne ( 142751 ) on Saturday February 03, 2007 @01:49AM (#17870366) Homepage
    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 (Score:5, Interesting)

      by XanC ( 644172 ) on Saturday February 03, 2007 @01:56AM (#17870414)
      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: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by iminplaya ( 723125 )
      And how's their record on dealing with legal threats?

      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward

        And how's their record on dealing with legal threats?

        Several years back, dyndns.org cut my account for providing a copy of DeCSS. How's that for sticking up for their customers?

    • DynDNS has pricing [dyndns.com] rather than "prices". When I see that word, I think "pricey". Why should a domain name registrar be so expensive? What do they do with the money ($15 per year)?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jZnat ( 793348 ) *
        Apparently, by giving them a little more than other registrars, they provide good customer service, free dynamic DNS things, other free services, and don't squat every fucking domain someone searches for on their site if you don't register it in 24 hours. I think that would be worth it...

  • Vs. NetSol (Score:4, Funny)

    by P(0)(!P(k)+P(k+1)) ( 1012109 ) <math.induction@gmail.com> on Saturday February 03, 2007 @01:52AM (#17870388) Homepage Journal

    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.

    • It depends on what you are doing. If you don't own any domains someone might accuse you of squatting on, GoDaddy is quite stable. I have a number of domains registered through them and have never had any issues. Even if that might be an issue I'm not sure GoDaddy is quite so complacent as is made out.

      They make it a little more cumbersome to order a domain than you might like, but once you have the domain I think the managemnet tools are OK - though I've never used other registrars very heavily before I m

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Aladrin ( 926209 )
        The mods are on crack. Offtopic? If I stretch my mind, I can make this be offtopic because we're talking about not-GoDaddy. But just because someone sticks up for them does not make it offtopic.

        Not that I agree, I just think censorship is not only bad, but pointless and potentially dangerous.

        Also, don't mistake apathy for customer service. Just because they never did anything about one of your potential domain-squats doesn't mean that they even answer emails from people about them, or that they even rec

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Talian ( 746379 ) *
      Threaten to leave. I get my netsol domains renewed for 7.95 a year. Stable, and affordable.

  • Who needs a domain name? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 03, 2007 @01:56AM (#17870412)
    Just use your ip address! It's like a phone number, and people memorize those all the time.
    • Just use your ip address! It's like a phone number, and people memorize those all the time.

      Pfft. Real men do it in binary.

      http://1000010011001100000011101100011/
      Or for the lazy:

      http://1113982819/

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jZnat ( 793348 ) *
        I don't think you can specify IP addresses in binary. Decimal, yes. Hexidecimal, yes. Dotted-quad, yes. Binary and octal, no.

  • Joker (Score:2)

    by emag ( 4640 )
    I've been extremely happy with joker.com [joker.com]. They're not the cheapest (if/when the US dollar makes gains on the Euro it might work out better), but they're reliable. I don't know what else to say, as I've been using them so long, and been so happy, that I haven't bothered to look elsewhere.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by samjam ( 256347 )
      I prefer joker.

      I wish they'd do .uk domains too, I keep pushing them, but no luck yet.

      Sam

  • one more to avoid (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anthony Boyd ( 242971 ) on Saturday February 03, 2007 @02:08AM (#17870506) Homepage
    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! (Score:5, Informative)

    by Skal Tura ( 595728 ) on Saturday February 03, 2007 @02:09AM (#17870510) Homepage
    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
    • A quick google turns up a lot of registrars.

      I had a domain name registered at godaddy for a while, but I left, exactly because of the horror stories from their (alleged?) "we'll pull any site that generates complaints without investigating one bit" policy. I don't host anything controversial (in fact, I use my domainnames almost exclusively for e-mail), but all it takes is someone deciding to (fake) some spam advertising your domainname, and you can kiss it goodbye.

      Something godaddy pulled on me was that wh

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by aymanh ( 892834 )
        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.
      • Here are NameCheap.com's features [namecheap.com]. Anything missing from Enom.com's features [enom.com]? Is NameCheap.com really an Enom.com reseller?

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Mike1024 ( 184871 )
      You REALLY have to ask alternatives for GoDaddy? That's some hell of a marketing.

      The poster could probably have found other registrars easily - google would have happily given him thousands. I think what he really wanted is "alternative registrars to GoDaddy, which don't suck".

      Clearly, if you're moving away from one company because of bad service, you don't want to move to a company that's worse. And the domain name business is full of dodgy "free domain parking", companies who register domains if you check
    • I've been using RegisterFly.com for years, and have had excellent results. There may be better ones out there, but RegisterFly.com has been very, very reliable for me.
  • ...cheap enough, stable enough.
    www.stargateinc.com (I don't work for them...)

    -sid

  • Support userfriendly.org (Score:5, Interesting)

    by satherto ( 513840 ) <scott@atherto[ ]ch.com ['nte' in gap]> on Saturday February 03, 2007 @02:14AM (#17870556) Homepage
    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.

    • Parent comment is very interesting.

      But Register4Less.com has "pricing structure" [register4less.com] instead of "prices". You know what that means. "Registering one domain name for one year will cost $14.95, already saving you $20 or more as compared to some other registrars." Paying almost twice as much saves you $20 per year? They mean "some other [very expensive] registrars".
    • satherto wrote:

      I had a domain expire that was originally on GoDaddy...about 8 months later...When I tried to renew through GoDaddy, they said that it was on hold, and it would cost $$$ extra to release it...

      I think this is actually a feature rather than a bad thing. If your registrar lets your domain go then it will be picked up by a squatter. Then if you want it back the squatter will put it up for auction and/or extort you for as much as they think they can. Just a couple weeks ago I forgot about an ol

  • gkg.net

    I have been using them for years. They are cheap, their website is good enough, and never had a problem with them. In the beginning when I talked to their tech support for something they were very friendly and helpful.
  • I've had great luck with Directnic. They also offer cheap hosting if all you need for a while is a placeholder or brochure-ware sites. I don't think they do anything with CGI or databases or anything dynamic, though.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by wickedsteve ( 729684 )
      One great thing about directnic is that if your paid for hosting gets used up from too much traffic (say you get slashdotted) they just switch it to free hosting with a banner. They are affordable and great for small sites if you do not need CGI, ASP, JSP, PHP, MySQL, ColdFusion or FrontPage extensions.
      • I forgot to mention they are also the company that got all the notice after Katrina. They're in New Orleans and they kept going through the entire hurricane and aftermath. The guy handling the emergency became well known for his blog, which I think was even mentioned in a story here.
  • All my domains have DNS servers NS1.domain.com NS2.domain.com that are registered with the root nameservers. Godaddy supports this online, but for other registrars its a manual process (hello Melbourne IT).

    Does others have this issue, and what registrar would you recommend?

  • enames (Score:2)

    by nnet ( 20306 )
    www.enameco.com, they even have a "register nameserver" button, cool.

  • GANDI (Score:5, Informative)

    by iriefrank ( 41550 ) on Saturday February 03, 2007 @02:45AM (#17870748) Homepage
    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.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by hords ( 619030 )
      One of my friends had well over 50 domains with Gandi. There was a dispute with one of his domains and they shut them ALL down. He did get them to turn them back on, but after some hassle. My biggest complaint with Gandi when I was using them was that they took forever to implement domain locking when pretty much every other registrar offered it, and their control panel was a bit lacking. Other than those experiences, I enjoyed their service. You just can't beat GoDaddy's price, especially with bulk discoun

    • One small issue (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Xenographic ( 557057 )
      The only issue I would have with them is a requirement that the Whois information be accurate and that they'll suspend you if it's not. I wouldn't care to put my real name, address & email up there for everyone to harvest, personally.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Kalriath ( 849904 )
        That's a requirement of ICANN, not theirs. WHOIS information must be Valid, and YOURS (or someone who represents you, privacy services do meet this requirement). So if you don't put your name, address and email, or at least a valid representative of yourself, you can EXPECT your domain to be flushed down the drain.

  • Gandi (Score:5, Informative)

    by illuminatedwax ( 537131 ) <stdrange@alumni. ... u ['go.' in gap]> on Saturday February 03, 2007 @02:47AM (#17870750) Journal
    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 (Score:4, Insightful)

    by lorcha ( 464930 ) on Saturday February 03, 2007 @02:47AM (#17870752)
    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.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Aladrin ( 926209 )
      Speaking of Tucows, I use DomainMonger, who is a reseller for Tucows. (Found that out afterwards.)

      They are a bit expensive ($13/mo minimum) and their DNS stuff is lame (only certain records, can't write the bind stuff yourself) but they've been pretty stable for me. I keep thinking about moving to another one, but then I hear the horror stories like in these posts and I decide that $13/yr isn't that bad after all. That's like 2 months hosting costs.

  • Nearlyfreespeech.net (Score:4, Interesting)

    by CliffSpradlin ( 243679 ) <cliff.spradlin@g ... minus physicist> on Saturday February 03, 2007 @02:50AM (#17870768) Journal
    http://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/ [nearlyfreespeech.net] -- these guys are the best. Check out their site, you'll understand.
    • Nearlyfreespeech.net costs $7.30/year [nearlyfreespeech.net] for email forwarding? Apparently you cannot discover the features offered unless you are already a customer [nearlyfreespeech.net]: "Visit the Domains tab in our user interface for more information."
      • "Apparently you cannot discover the features offered unless you are already a customer"

        If by already a customer, you mean signed up for a free (+ $0.02 bonus added) account, then yes. Everything is a la carte in their system, so while you're required to have at least a single site or domain setup for the account to stay active for more than say 60 days, you certainly are under no obligations to buy anything, or even to provide credit card information.

        That being said, their non-member site gives a pretty com
  • There's a list of registars at http://www.internic.net/alpha.html [internic.net] if you'd really like to compare. Myself, I tranferred a domain away from GoDaddy, and didn't have any particular problems (I transferred partly because I could get a better deal elsewhere, and partly because I don't want my domains all over the place). I currently use DreamHost and 000Domains, both of which seem decent enough.
  • I used to be with NetSol, until they started having really bad security issues allowing for domain hijacking a few years ago. I looked around and wound up with Register, because at the time they had one of the most secure systems for changing information, not to mention they had a great coupon at the time :) I ended up buying multiple years for each of 9 domains. Since then, I suspect a few other registrars have started up that are good, but I haven't bothered to look around, yet, since I don't need to rene

  • Avoid Yahoo Domains! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by amaupin ( 721551 ) on Saturday February 03, 2007 @03:42AM (#17871014) Homepage

    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

    • Please note that the company offering Yahoo domains' service differs from country to country.

      Their scheme works this way (as you already found out): Yahoo! interconnects its users via an obscure login algorithm involving a shared secret and some header redirects to a company which functions as a domain registrar. Yahoo! never shares any account information with said company, so you (as customer) have to register twice: Once for Yahoo! and the second time for the registrar.

      The fact that they converted you to

  • VoxDomains.com (Score:4, Informative)

    by ninjaz ( 1202 ) on Saturday February 03, 2007 @03:42AM (#17871018)
    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.
  • I've been using aitdomains.com for over a year now. $8 per usual domain IIRC, barely any trouble at all, and their customer support actually replies and solves problems. No DNS servers however, but I get those at dnsmadeeasy.com for $0.75 each plus goodies, and they have yet to fail me once. Total: less than $9 per domain and no hassle.
  • Enom has been suggested, I'd like to say why.

    I have over 50 domains, and when I teach HTML classes, I buy each student a web domain. Enom is not for the casual web domain user. You have to deposit funds starting at $100US, but the domains are only $8.10US. The website is very thourough, and includes custom MX records, DNS entries, and a free web generator for those who don't know HTML or hate parking spam pages.

    It's easy to transfer domains, and they have excellent customer service. I've been with them for
  • Main topic: I've not had any problem with HostIreland, though as you may be able to guess from the name they like to combine domain registration with hosting. One (host) to avoid at all costs is NetPivotal: they reverted my site to a week-old backup without telling me, then randomly merged the front page with my first page, a placeholder that had only been up for a few days. Oh, and to upload pages securely, the only option is* a bloated geocities-style file manager. Aside: I can understand being upset by
  • I've had excellent service from joker.com over the years.

    It Just Works. No BS, no loud advertising, just working registry service.

    The only complaint I have about them is that their DNS service doesn't allow wildcards. I'm not losing any sleep over that, though.
    • Joker.com is $12/year [joker.com] with a list of free features.

      I feel uncomfortable with the name. When someone chooses a poor name for a business, doesn't that indicate a low amount of business sophistication?

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by rueger ( 210566 )
      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 g
  • I've been using DirectI for years. The web interface is heavy and slow, but the domains are cheap and the customer service is good and friendly. The thing to do, though, is not to buy your domains from DirectI as a customer, but to sign up as a reseller. This is easy and gives you lower prices. Last I checked, prices were something like 6 to 7 US dollars per year, depending on volume.

  • GoDaddy Alternatives -- Try NoDaddy.Com (Score:5, Interesting)

    by fv ( 95460 ) * <fyodor@insecure.org> on Saturday February 03, 2007 @06:17AM (#17871544) Homepage

    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 (Score:4, Informative)

    by Tridus ( 79566 ) on Saturday February 03, 2007 @07:58AM (#17871986) Homepage
    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.)
  • I am currently with GoDaddy because it offers private domain registrations - my email and address are replaced by GoDaddy's email and address in whois lookups, and therefore it keeps spammers away from my inbox. What other registrars offer this private registration service?

  • NearlyFreeSpeech.NET (Score:3, Informative)

    by ThinkingInBinary ( 899485 ) <thinkinginbinary ... AGOom minus city> on Saturday February 03, 2007 @10:14AM (#17872872) Homepage

    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).

  • MarkMonitor [markmonitor.com]. They also seem to include services to register your domain (i.e. trademark, company name) across basically all the TLDs and ccTLDs as well as protection from phishing (so that would probably including registering all the typo.com et al. domains as well). Be warned, however, that it appears they also set the clientTransferProhibited, clientDeleteProhibited, and clientUpdateProhibited flags (according to GNU whois using VeriSign's whois database), so of course that would help from domain squatt

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