I'm trying to secure a somewhat decent .com domain so I have a space to put projects or even a blog so I can find some work. Also to have a mail address that does sound a bit more professional.<p>So far I've looked trough the usual articles (blogs, lifehacker stuff, e.g.) which advise against GoDaddy and recommend sites like Hover, Namecheap, Name.com and Gandi.<p>They all seem to offer nearly the same stuff for nearly the same prices. I'm really not sure who to take or if it even matters.<p>Not all of them offer cheap mailboxes. I really like to have name@domain.com without too much hazzle or beeing bound to gmail(which costs money anyway if you want to use your own domain if I understand correctly?!).<p>Gandi comes with a free mailbox which I guess is great. Namecheap asks for an additional tiny fee. Name.com doesn't host mail. Hover asks for another $20 which is a bit steep.<p>I'm living in Europe, does it matter whether I use an US-based registrar? Does it if my site would be used for a business?<p>I'm beeing overwhelmed by choices.
I'm not very familiar with Gandi but I'd suggest you go with Namecheap. I currently host most of my domains with Godaddy, though I've never had any serious problems there there, the terrible customer support and the fact that they try to up-sell me (some crap like a site badge) every time I login is infuriating me.<p>Namecheap has good customer serivce and IMO is worth paying the little extra. You can hook up Namecheap to Rackspace mail for ($2 a mo).<p>Location does not matter.
Nope, business or personal, it's totally fine.
It sounds like Gandi might be your best bet - they offer five free e-mail addresses, a free SSL cert, and other benefits if you register a domain with them.<p>When all is said and done, a lot of the registrars around are reselling from the same company, and it doesn't make a huge difference who you go with. After the GoDaddy fiasco, there was a lot of talk about alternatives: <a href="http://kevnull.com/2011/11/domain-name-registration-alternatives-to-go-daddy.html" rel="nofollow">http://kevnull.com/2011/11/domain-name-registration-alternat...</a>