Why is it so hard to be a good domain registrar?
marco.org
marco.org
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.
Personally, i disagree that all commodity businesses need to be that way. Higher quality and lower prices (/especially/ lower prices) are marketing in and of themselves. For most of the time I've been in business, my model has been to take the marketing costs and just apply those to discounts.
Now, this is much easier in the VPS business than in the registrar business, 'cause as far as I can tell, the VPS business is much higher margin. Really, it's pretty easy, in this market, to differentiate yourself on price, just because retail prices are so much higher than the cost of goods sold.
when you sell a .com domain, the lowest your costs can ever be is $6.25 a year (or, at least that's what it was last time I looked) and the retail prices aren't that much higher than that, so without using domains as a loss leader, it's pretty difficult to differentiate yourself through price. Heck, considering the margin there, if you have much by way of customer acquisition costs or /any/ customer support costs, you are either charging an uncompetitive rate or you are losing money (and needing to make it up somewhere else)
I think the problem with the domain registrar business is that instead of costs being dominated by equipment or something else where you can innovate (or that just automatically becomes dramatically cheaper year over year) costs are dominated by administrative fees you have to pay the next guy up the chain.
If that's true, it's not a commodity business.
"There is a spectrum of commodification, rather than a binary distinction of "commodity versus differentiable product"."
What you were actually challenging was his characterization of domain registration as a commodity business; I don't disagree with you there, I just wanted your point clarified.
Well, no. It's a continuum, rather than a black and white thing. I wrote a long argument then edited it back to the wikipedia quote, as that mostly sums things up.
My business is more 'commodity' I think, than slicehost, mostly because of the marketing angles we take. Obviously, the market for a certain grade of steel is far more of a commodity, though I suspect that if I knew more about that market, I'd find it was less than an absolute commodity.
Of course, one way they get away with a higher price is that they primarily sell DNS services. So it may be more expensive to pay with them, but it's also more convenient to have them handle both DNS and registration. (though I currently use their free domain service for some of those domains).
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.
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.
That being said, I'd pay a lot more than that just for their clean (although slightly dated looking) interface. I'll be switching the rest of my domains to them in another month or so.
what ever happen to paying for things
I guess most people using their registrar service also use them as a host, so it makes sense to pay for it in the same way.
/notanemployee
When you use NFSN for domain registration, you will probably also pay for whois privacy ($3.65/year) and DNS services. DNS services for domains registered with NFSN are $1.22/year, but if you host the website for that domain at NFSN you will only pay $0.41/year. So they do actually earn money on domain-only customers and they also give you an incentive to use them not just for domain registration.
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.
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).
Still worth it
Another positive is that their site is entirely garbage-free, and they're not constantly trying to sell you something. I get the impression that they mostly do domain registration as a value-add for their DNS and other infrastructure-as-a-service customers.
I recently moved all my domains from GoDaddy to http://internet.bs because they don't do any funny stuff, they're very inexpensive, and they're outside the jurisdiction of belligerent and unfriendly Western governments.
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.
(Their hosting, however, is a totally different story…)
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 never used it, so can't speak for the quality/services though.
Strike one: I messaged their support asking when they'd get a usability expert to look at their awful interface. Response was basically "get used to it". So don't expect it ever to change.
Strike two: the maddeningly pervasive upselling. Wading through 500KB pages of desperate attempts to sell you hosting, SSL certs, and steak knives sapped most of my will to live.
Strike three: Trying to spin hunting a endangered species in a corrupt banana republic as a heroic and selfless deed made me vomit.
YOU'RE OUT, GODADDY! And I feel so much cleaner now my domains are with Namecheap.
Except Google is not exactly known for their stellar customer service, either.
DNS Interface: http://img806.imageshack.us/img806/8523/dynadot.png
Dynadot rocks:
Domain Name:WIKILEAKS.ORG Created On:04-Oct-2006 05:54:19 UTC Last Updated On:17-Dec-2010 01:57:59 UTC Expiration Date:04-Oct-2018 05:54:19 UTC Sponsoring Registrar:Dynadot, LLC (R1266-LROR)
Customer comment on the front page "Thanks for the escape ladder from GoDaddy!"
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.
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.
Hover, which Marco suggests, seems to be a retail part of Tucows.
I've been considering a switch to Hover, but haven't done a trial run yet.
They're less obnoxious than GoDaddy but that's not saying much.
I notified support about this and the representative said he agrees that it's a security flaw and that he had "sent it up the chain", although this was last year.
Despite this, they're still my preferred registrar.
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.
(I am an ICANN Accredited registrar one of the first..)
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.
But, it appears to be in the registrar's best interest to not encourage users to run their own DNS server -- as the article points out, that contributes to their lockin.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If I found a better service than namecheap, then I'll happily move to them the next year.
Just don't ever forgot to prolong a domain name – keep your (company's) contract information up to date.
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.
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.
Would this be a good addition to http://ParkedAvenue.com?
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.
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.
original comment: Yeah, except if you use them for dns -- which I prefer to leave on my registrar -- they're assholes who spam everyone who mistypes a subdomain. Better yet, they throw ads on there and pocket the money. Cute, right?
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.
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 :)
This won't work. You either have to charge more than people will be willing to pay or sell them things they need (or don't need). You can't make money doing what you are doing.
(Written by an actual ICANN Acredited regitrar..)
joker.com - 10+ years now, over 100 domains, referred dozens of people, never a problem.
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
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. ↩And are there additional restrictions on Indian domains? Not sure. For example, last time I checked, only Americans could register .us domains.
Second, this doesn't make GoDaddy a terrible company. But it does mean that their CEO has terrible judgement. For most people, the elephant slaughter was the straw that broke the camel's back. We had endured the awful user interface and saturation upselling for years, but for all the reasons explained in the comments above, we didn't switch our domains. But I'm dammed if I'm going to pay a cent more to such a narcissistic idiot.
Finally, if you still like the idea of hosting at GoDaddy, go for it - that's your choice, and I respect it. Good luck!
To answer Marco's question: It is hard to be a good domain registrar but not impossible.
Let me tell you my little personal story about bootstrapping iWantMyName. I left Germany at the end of 2007 after working for a German domain registrar for nearly 6 years. We were successful (2 million domains under management) and the big ones GoDaddy, NetSol, eNom, Register.com etc. just started registering ccTLDs (country code top-level domains) through us.
But something didn't feel right... Domain registrars were getting lots of bad press (frontrunning, parking) and I started thinking of building a new domain management service. In the meantime I moved to Australia and after 6 months of being with an Australian registrar, I had enough. It was time to finally take the plunge. So I moved from Australia to New Zealand where we launched iWantMyName with zero dollar investment in December 2008. I knew one of my co-founders from Germany (luckily he was the former CTO of a registrar back in Germany and had enough of Europe too).
The first year was hard. Really fucking hard. We still had to do some consulting jobs to survive and our service could do nothing but register domains. No transfers, only certain DNS record types were supported, no whois updates. But for me it was really surprising how few features people actually need. Our site architecture helps to keep design work at a minimum level too, it's intentionally kept simple. Actually, we don't even have a designer in our team.
So where are we now a bit more than 2 years later? Well, we're running a profitable domain management service which generates six figures in revenue. This currently supports three founders, one employee and every single cent that's left will go into improving the user experience. No upselling, no annoying ads, no parking crap, auctions and what have you. We have decided not to compete on price, features or add crappy hosting services but only to give customers what they really need and that is purchasing / managing domains. Having said that, there's still lots of room for improvement and we will not stop until we've build the domain registrar Marco is looking for.
All the best!
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.