Ive spent alot of time in this field and can give you a perfect answer:<p>Serious domainer (buying + selling domains for a living): Moniker or Fabulous.com - Both are designed to handle mass updating of domains easy and for optimal parking. Monikers support is 9-5 and fabulous is invite only. Both are still fantastic.<p>Everyone else: Name.com :<p>Why name.com? Outstanding support staff, Free privacy, Low prices, Great reputation in domaining community. Outstanding security.<p>You are right to not use godaddy. They are pure evil, see godaddysucks.com for more proof. I recently moved all my domains off of them just to be safe.<p>Also, do not use a domain registrar thats tied to a host ( dreamhost or otherwise ) - While they may be a good HOST, they can not simply compare to a dedicated registrar. I do believe they are nothing more than opensrs resellers anyways so their involvement is limited and should you have a problem, prepare to jump through quite a few hoops.
This comes up with some regularity.<p>I use 'moniker.com', I'm pretty happy with them but I only register my domains there, everything else is on my own servers, so if you go for hosted DNS and other goodies I can't tell you much.<p>Moniker prides itself on never having lost a domain and their prices are pretty good.<p>Previous experience would lead me to stay away from bulkregister/enom, godaddy and netsol.
Here are some relevant links:<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=150561" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=150561</a><p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=708640" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=708640</a><p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=186369" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=186369</a><p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=963838" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=963838</a>
I like Dreamhost. I can stick unlimited small PHP or even Rails sites there for just $10/month, and their control panel is excellent. You can mask your domain ownership for free as well. $9.99 per domain is not the cheapest, but it's competitive, and I trust them more than any other top-25 volume web hosts.