I already found their 301 redirect to be a pain and would love to get some credible suggestions for a trustworthy alternative.
Thanks! :)
While I'm at it, here are some more anecdotes. I started on casual web dev in the late 90s and started with Network Solutions because that was the only registrar for a .com back in the days. They were OK at first, but after registrars opened up it was apparent they wanted to maintain being the most expensive option. By early 2010s I moved my main domains away and ran into a lot of difficulties moving; they make you jump through enough hoops I'm guessing in hopes you'd give up. It was not a good experience.
In the early 2000s when registrars first started opening up I also had a couple of domains on Joker. They were cheap and kind of ok but for many years their site was consistently very slow. Eventually I also started having a lot of account issues there. In the end I stopped using them by virtue of me stopping work on the sites using the domains I registered at Joker.
One of my startups in the 2010s, my cofounder used domain.com as a registrar. It was not good. We would have tons of issues with any sort of DNS or nameserver config, things wouldn't work or propagate correctly, and so on. I don't have a take on whether they are trustworthy or not, but there were just tons of technical issues.
I've also briefly used Gandi once for a specific TLD my startup needed to use, and in my limited experience there wasn't any issues.
I use them for infinitely long time and had no problems (besides the moment when they changed their user interface few years ago that caused backlash from technical users - but nothing functionally wrong, just stupid UI "improvements")
Great prices. Free domain privacy. Friendly support. Good newsletter. And funny.
I posted about them here a few days ago, but they are unbelievably better than every registrar I've ever used. And I've used Namecheap, Godaddy, Bluehost, Google Domains, the list goes on.
They're profitable, bootstrapped, going nowhere, been around a long time. Their dashboard is so simple and they make it easy to use DNS templates, but they also have a simple and friendly API.
Their evidence is thorough. There are plenty of good reasons to change registrars, but the story you read probably wasn’t caused by Godaddy.
By reserving the domain they make it more likely you don't buy somewhere else and more likely that someone will spot the interest and front run you.
"By February 2007, the CEO of Go Daddy reported that of 55.1 million domain names registered, 51.5 million were canceled and refunded just before the 5 day grace period expired and only 3.6 million domain names were actually kept."
The fact that they don't actually buy for a long time is not really interesting IMO.
This obviously harmed the ecosystem and I’m sure not advocating for it (nor recommending Godaddy), but it’s not an example of a registrar front-running real customers.
https://www.namecheap.com/support/knowledgebase/article.aspx...
anything@example.com
Otherwise AWS Route 53.
Reasons: They're straightforward with pricing, throw in a good if basic email service for each domain (two addresses), customer service is responsive and technically competent, provide a useful newsletter but are not pushy with it.
I generally point my domains to AWS which is where I manage everything, so I have not used eNom's other features extensively but they offer a number of related services.
Namecheap sometimes.
Hexonet for search & sometimes buying too.
I trust all above three from experience.