Margins may be low, but the domain registrar market seems ripe for disruption. Are there any interesting upstarts in this space?
The goal was to make a domain name registration and management system I'd like to use. That means no upselling and no charging for standard services like whois privacy, url forwarding, and email forwarding.
I also made it easy to set your domain names to not auto-renew and to transfer away your name.
There is also no magical price change the second year or hidden fees that show up at the end of the purchasing process.
I have a quick repair only. If you see your site with Chrome on Windows 7, there's something about the text that doesn't feel right, it looks too thin to be readable at some sizes. For example, the navigation on the bottom left or (even worse) the text inside the inputs of the login form. It's because of Myriad Pro, not sure if you feel like changing it for some more usual typeface like Arial.
The thing with GoDaddy, which is bigger than it's 8 nearest competitors combined, is that they've been successful on the back of mass marketing, and earning more dollars off of every single customer they have.
All those add ons, that we geeks so easily ignore, are just mindlessly added on by a large majority of other customers who really have no idea what they need. So instead of earning $2 or $3 for the domain registration service, like other registrars do, GoDaddy ends up earning $200 or $300 from those customers (which gives them more money to use towards marketing again).
I think a major hosting company with a good reputation might be able to make inroads into the domain registration industry (Amazon or Rackspace perhaps), but I don't think most people would trust their domains with a startup.