We spend lot of time thinking about making our services resilient against failure at the infrastructure level yet the domain registrar is often overlooked.

Not only do you have to worry about them making a technical mistake there is also the risk of a phishing attack.

A while back I did a bit of research about what was the most reliable registrar and the only one that i could find was Markmonitor. Most of the big sites (google.com facebook.com etc) use them. They offer lots of cool features that i had never heard of like registrar level locking and custom 'protocols' (like a phonecall from X no. of authorised people) to validate a change. Plus some others that seemed less interesting (to me) such as the brand protection.

They do of course charge a pretty penny. From memory there was a minimum cost of $30k per year which allowed you pretty much as many domains as you might want and the promise of being able to get ahold of a human if something goes wrong.