The article answers its own question. It's hard because it's a commodity business. Customer acquisition costs eat up all the margin. Trying to differentiate the product costs money which would result in raising prices, which results in losing customers, most of whom choose on price and then complain about quality. So, it's a race to the bottom - everyone trying to cut costs (other than marketing) to the bare minimum so they can reduce prices as far as possible. All the money goes to marketing, and none goes into improving the quality of the offering.<p>It's very similar to airlines. We all complain about bag fees and charging for meals or extra legroom, but it's we the customers who have driven them there by making price our primary, if not sole, criteria for vendor selection.
NearlyFreeSpeech is, IMO, the only registrar worth using.<p>It is simple, and the site is clean to a fault. There is zero advertising or service upselling - each page contains what it needs to and nothing else.<p>They're not the place to go to get cute with your TLDs, but for the standard TLDs, I refuse to go anywhere else. Even well-liked registrars like NameCheap are a big pile of spam in comparison.
I've tried NearlyFreeSpeech, Gandi, Joker and InterNetworX. Gandi and Joker are expensive, inwx is so-so and NFS is cheap but has an extremely limited selection of TLDs. NFS and Joker have terrible interfaces, Gandi's is somewhat nice, however it's just way too big, inwx's is nice (somewhat unintuitive, but fast and compact). Joker makes accidentally deleting something hard, inwx makes it way too easy. Gandi pollutes your default zone file, NFS puts a SPF record there (which I like).<p>If you've just a few .com domains and don't need a registrar outside the US, use NFS. Otherwise, for the time being, I'd recommend inwx.
Not to turn this into a recommendation fest, but I've used DynDNS (<a href="http://www.dyndns.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.dyndns.com/</a>) for DNS hosting, and it appears they offer registrar services? <a href="http://www.dyndns.com/services/domains/" rel="nofollow">http://www.dyndns.com/services/domains/</a><p>It's a great, reliable DNS service in my experience, more geared toward hackers than the GoDaddy crowd (e.g. you can edit your DNS records directly with fine-grained control over TTL).
Perhaps it's not that it's <i>hard</i> to be good but rather it's far more <i>lucrative</i> to be bad?<p>I recently moved all my domains from GoDaddy to <a href="http://internet.bs" rel="nofollow">http://internet.bs</a> because they don't do any funny stuff, they're very inexpensive, and they're outside the jurisdiction of belligerent and unfriendly Western governments.
I use GoDaddy for all of my domains and I don't understand what all of the complaints are about. I may host 40ish domains through them, and I've never had a problem with price, support or control over any of my domains.<p>These days it seems like leaving GoDaddy is the cool thing to do. If a company's marketing tactics or a CEO's out-of-office actions put you off, then that's one thing, but as for the product itself and how well it performs: GoDaddy performs as well as anything else I've seen for what I consider a fair price.<p>(Their hosting, however, is a totally different story…)
It makes me wonder why Google doesn't create a registrar service. Not to make money - perhaps they'd even run at a loss - but to offer a service that doesn't make you hate yourself every time you have to interact with them.<p>Considering the fact that Google depends on a rich, diverse internet (rather than a clumped, Facebook-y internet), this seems like a natural move for them.
I've been using DynaDot.com myself, prices seem decent. originally picked them because they took paypal (i had some free money in a paypal account from selling my opinion). Haven't used them for dns so i don't know if they do any funny stuff though like some users report other registrars doing.
I've only heard good things about DNSimple <a href="https://dnsimple.com/" rel="nofollow">https://dnsimple.com/</a><p>Customer comment on the front page "Thanks for the escape ladder from GoDaddy!"
I use Tucows OpenSRS (I'm a reseller, but otherwise, just find someone reasonable who is a reseller -- it used to be free to join, then $100, now I think $250).<p>Basically direct access to both a website and an API for registry functions. If you register enough domain names internally, it's totally worth it. I've never had a problem with them.<p>They started out as a linux-friendly ISP in Canada, I believe, and have become basically a reasonable registrar -- one of the first group of 34 independent registrars approved by ICANN, and I think the first to really work with resellers.<p>Hover, which Marco suggests, seems to be a retail part of Tucows.
The article stated: "and it can cause an hours-long DNS outage if it’s not done perfectly.".<p>The only case where there would be any dns outage is if the registrar is handling the dns. If the registrar isn't doing the dns there is zero dns outage. Part of the transfer process is that the old dns automatically gets carried over.<p>(I am an ICANN Accredited registrar one of the first..)<p>I think what people have to understand is that all registrars pay the same price for domains. Whether you are godaddy or the smallest. (The other costs are fixed). So I think it is obvious that you aren't going to have "price quality speed" all from the same place. Additionally registrars charging no money are either making money elsewhere or they are going to go out of business or using domains as a loss leader.
I keep my domains at pairnic — they're a geeky small company, but they're good enough to do the trick. Granted you can get all of the fancy domains, but what I've learned is that less is more when going to register a domain.
I too finally moved away from GoDaddy and had trouble finding a good domain registrar. I ended up going with EasyDNS after I saw how they handled being wrongly associated with pulling Wikileak's domain.
The reason is because it's a very difficult and competitive market and the step up from good to excellent customer service isn't worth the extra cost.<p>You can go for low-cost, high-volume (GoDaddy and most others) or high-end, higher cost, lower volume (Network Solutions and a few more).<p>Because the end user experience of getting a domain - as you point out - is pretty much of buying and then only very occasionally making changes, there is no real middle market. Every registry charges a wholesale price and you can charge only a tiny margin before you are priced out the market.<p>The reason that good registrars get worse, ironically, is because they become successful. Once you start dealing with larger and larger volumes, it gets harder to maintain your customer service and price.<p>And the one thing that you don't hear about - but registrars will tell you privately - is that as soon as you get broader public awareness you end up with really difficult customers who chew up alot of time, are usually wrong, or have a complete misunderstanding of how it works, and make life difficult for your customer service teams. It's the curse of being popular in a commodity market.<p>In that sense, GoDaddy does a good job balancing price with level of customer service given the huge numbers of interactions it has to deal with.<p>Personally, I have my domains split over a number of different companies: GoDaddy (US), Heart Internet (UK), Network Solutions (US) and Blacknight (Ireland). If anything I'd give Heart Internet the edge.
I don't think I agree with the article. I moved from my old registrar to namecheap because my registrar really sucked (and yet I consider it better than GoDaddy). I didn't move immediately, I moved the next year, but I planned the move and before the domains re-new I hit the transfer button. While it was a little bit awkward, it was completely worth the time.<p>If I found a better service than namecheap, then I'll happily move to them the next year.
I've been dealing with at least 6-7 registrars during the years – all the way back to Network Solutions – both professionally and for personal use, and honestly never had any real problems with any of them. I've always avoided and advised others to avoid the cheapest options though. They might work fine for just an email address or website forwarder, but do you really want to trust a serious business to a company called GoDaddy?<p>Just don't ever forgot to prolong a domain name – keep your (company's) contract information up to date.<p>My personal domains are hosted at Gandi. They seem most aligned with the open-source philosophy and community, and they feel geek-friendly and less corporate and spam-like. They are located in Europe, which somehow makes me feel safer regarding DMCA take-downs or whatever suing troll pops up from nowhere. I don't feel very strongly about it, but I am happy with their services.<p>As I already said, I've never had any difficulties with any of the major registrars, so it doesn't really surprise me that most people don't have strong opinions or incentives to change.
I am implementing some domain monitoring tools on my site, ParkedAvenue, and this gives me a good idea. I will monitor my customer's domains, and then will be able to let them know when they are up for renewal, and hopefully offers an easy for them to migrate to better registrars!<p>Would this be a good addition to <a href="http://ParkedAvenue.com" rel="nofollow">http://ParkedAvenue.com</a>?
I'm always surprised in these conversations that Dreamhost never gets mentioned. I've had nothing but great experiences with them for registrar work. They also have $15 SSL certs that cover both the root and the www subdomain. And one of the things I love most about them is how easy they make it to leave, should you ever decide to do that.
I have all my domains with Dotster. They're a little expensive, and over the years their site has gotten spammier looking (always have to say no to the add-ons when buying a domain, no I do not need shitty hosting), but I first signed up with them in all the way back in 2000, and like the article says - the lockin is pretty high. All my domains are on auto-renew on my credit card, and I only login to their site maybe about once a year?<p>Never had any noticeable outages or anything with them, but I don't have any big sites either, just personal stuff. I've never had to contact their customer support, so I don't know if it's good or bad. Occasionally I think about switching to someplace a few dollars cheaper, but most of the registrars that don't have reputations for horrible customer support tend to be near the same price ($15ish/year) so I haven't bothered.
I register all of my domains a Dreamhost—they're a hosting company and their core business is not registration. No problems testing domain availability, no squatted urls even after things expire. Reg. is something like $10, and I'm not going to sweat $1 - $2 over the piece of mind.
Can someone correct me on this: was hover originally called mail bank or name bank? And had a practice of registering peoples last names as domains? I recall this because I tried to register my last name through mail bank in 1998 and they registered it for themselves...
I just recently transferred all of my domains over from GoDaddy to Moniker, which was relatively painless with their site heavily oriented around bulk transfers. Although the control panel could be better, it is sooo much better than GoDaddy's. When I logged in to GoDaddy to transfer these domains, not having logged in for quite some time, and with their ever changing, incredibly busy design, it took me a good 60 seconds or so to even find the link to the 'domain manager'.<p>The whole elephant incident alone wouldn't have made me switch, but after wanting to try something new for some time, that was all I needed to put the effort in to finding someone else.
Following several recommendations I got on HN, I've moved all my domains to Namecheap. It's been pretty solid thus far; haven't had any real issues that I can think of. It'd be nice if their site was a bit less spammy, though.
I use omnis.com, and I wish they promoted the domain name angle of their services separately from the rest of their hosting.<p>The purchase process is straightforward, little upselling (no, I never want hosting or privacy protection!), and the prices remain the same each year, unlike godaddy which gets you at a low price then has higher renewal prices. Example - all my renewing domains are >$10 at godaddy, but omnis.com are $8.25. I'm getting a discount from omnis because I have >50 with them now.
I'm working on a registrar that just focuses on domains. I want to be the Chipotle of domain registrars. Life has been happening and putting me behind, but if you are interested I'd love some more people to e-mail when I finish it: <a href="http://nameptr.com" rel="nofollow">http://nameptr.com</a><p>Sorry for the shameless plug... but this the third or fourth post I've seen, and I had to mention that I am working on something :)
The trick is not to evaluate registrars who play the price game, you get what you pay for.<p>joker.com - 10+ years now, over 100 domains, referred dozens of people, never a problem.<p>Edit: to add to this, don't host your DNS at a shitty domain registrar and then complain about it later. Get a proper DNS host like easydns. Keep the two separate
Really loved this bit:<p><pre><code> Oh, and you can’t delete a GoDaddy account. (Really
makes you want to sign up, right?) But you can cancel
all of your purchased products in it, remove all of your
payment information, and change all required contact
fields (email, mailing address, phone, etc.) to fake values. ↩</code></pre>
i used iwantmyname.com recently. it seems to be a pretty easy to use website and most importantly for me was that they had .io domain names. the service has been first rate, i typically get responses relatively quickly.
I've had nothing but good experiences with iWantMyName [1]. My experience with them and GoDaddy has been like night and day. They provide simple, reasonably priced and to the point registration and management. Couldn't be happier with them.<p>[1] <a href="http://iwantmyname.com/" rel="nofollow">http://iwantmyname.com/</a>
I understand subscribing to bad registrars. I mean, I don't really understand why people ignore all of the evidence against GoDaddy until it bites them in the ass, but it seems to happen a lot.<p>I may never understand though, why people are using the registrar's provided DNS services. I shudder writing that sentence. It just makes no sense.