Desperation: Go Daddy calling customers, begging them to stay
thenextweb.com
thenextweb.com
1) Namecheap has been the most recommended on HN. They don't take American Express and they don't offer auto-renew. Going back to manually checking and renewing domains every month after years of not having to do that feels like using rotary phones again. And they'd be my only business expense not on my Amex card.
2) Gandi.net gets mentioned in every thread, but they're in France, people have commented on trouble getting phone support because of a language barrier, and they're expensive. That extra $150 a year it would cost me compared to GoDaddy/Namecheap is a lot to waste.
3) Moniker has some very concerning reviews since some kind of management change, about silent price hikes and lying customer service.
4) Hover.com seems to have a rep here advertising, but I've never heard of them and they're too expensive given that fact.
Is name.com all that's left? That's the only other one I see recommended in these threads, despite some less than ethical practices of their own, like hijacking the * A-record of your domain for ads if you host DNS with them.
I want to deal with the company that controls my fate in the event of a legal issue, domain theft... or if we lose this battle, responding to SOPA actions. A reseller is a bit powerless to help you with those things.
Now add SOPA to the mix for a site that hosts user content (like blog comments). If anyone files a right of action against you, the registrar pulls your domain, and you have 5 days to file a counternotice to get it back. If you're buying from a reseller like this, how many of those 5 days are wasted between the time they're notified by the registrar they resell and them notifying you? You really don't have the time to spare -- you need to get that notice, retain counsel, write and send the counternotice, and get it to the registrar (who you may not be able to directly contact by buying through the reseller) before time's up.
By the way, Hover.com is basically TUCOWS, which makes them one of the biggest registrars.
Here is a thread where their CEO personally responded to some concerns.
http://webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1081420
Here are some positive comments about their reliability.
http://webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1072054
Here is a thread about using CloudFlare with them, which is something you might want to do when it comes to better DNS.
http://webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1090725
EDIT: They take American Express, they automatically renew, and given that you are concerned about SOPA, you should know, for what it's worth, that your agreement with them will be "governed by the laws of The Commonwealth of The Bahamas".
I don't know if it's possible to have it both ways. The registrar has to make money somehow. Personally I'm at the point where I'd rather pay the premium of $5 per domain per year (an approx. $500 premium in my case) than deal with the nonsense.
Honestly, as a US citizen, I do get nervous about using a non-US company, but I have no good reason for that feeling.
The name, Internet.BS, did make me smile though. This whole SOPA mess could be called Internet B.S.
Verisign makes available a few very simple operations that registries can invoke on this database in exchange for specific payments:
* Add X years to expiration date ($fee times X)
* Change registrar of domain and add 1 year to expiration ($fee)
* Change DNS servers of domain (free)
You paid GoDaddy to invoke the first operation, GoDaddy paid Verisign the fee, and the change was made in the database.
You are now going to pay some other registrar to invoke the second operation, they will pay Verisign the fee, and the change will be made in the database.
Your payment to GoDaddy was for a single thing (make this update to the database) and they already did it. There was not going to be any ongoing activity on subsequent years, there's no reason for any payment to move to anyone else.
http://www.namecheap.com/support/knowledgebase/article.aspx/...
That's about the best I can expect from a US-based registrar, they're on top of the PR right now so I'm sure they'll provide good service in case of any problems with the transfers, and their prices are competitive with what GoDaddy was offering.
As for my complaints about payment, I pre-funded my account through Google Checkout. That let me use my American Express card and I put enough on it to cover at least 2 years of auto-renewing my domains.
1) They are more expensive, but not that much per domain. Meanwhile, as opposed to helping draft SOPA, take a look at what they support:
https://www.gandi.net/supports/
2) The language barrier and the time difference have made for a slight obstacle on the one or two occasions I've had to contact support in 11 years. It wasn't completely insignificant, but it never made me regret my choice.
With no coupons, .com extension, including ICANN fees:
Gandi: $17.94/year
GoDaddy: $11.62/year
Namecheap: $10.16/year
So Gandi's premium is almost the whole retail price of a domain elsewhere. They're charging more than double what they pay Verisign per domain. It might be worth it, but it is a big difference.
$15 even is both what's on their price list and on my bank statement for the domain I renewed this month. If there are fees, I think they're included.
But even if I'm missing something, an ~$8 difference kindof proves my point. Sure, it's a big proportional difference, but the only reason that's the case is that the price of domains themselves isn't much in absolute terms -- it's not hard to spend more on dinner than any of the domain prices you listed, and the difference between Gandi and GoDaddy/Namecheap represents lunch, or a couple of coffees or sodas.
They accept Amex and will auto-renew. They're $9.99/yr (or within a few cents of that) and that includes private registration if that's something you're looking for. I've had no problems with them, their interface isn't perfect, but it's a lot nicer than most registrars' systems that I've used.
Now for the bad. They don't offer DNS service without a hosting package. I actually use NameCheap's DNS. NameCheap (being kinda a stand-up company) offers free DNS service to you even if you aren't their customer. And, frankly, their DNS control panel is nice enough that I would switch to them, except for the fact that they don't auto-renew and they charge extra for private registrations.
If you don't need DNS, DreamHost seems to work nicely. Decent control panel to make changes in, private registration included in the fee, auto-renewal, $9.99 price, and accepts Amex. It isn't their primary business, but they are ICANN accredited - and they aren't that small (http://www.dotandco.net/ressources/icann_registrars/details/..., see New Dream Network - not that far off from Name.com or Gandi).
* Sign up for a hosting plan one of the times that it was super-cheap (I paid like $9 for a year of hosting and got a free domain for the year.)
* Cancel hosting after cheap period is over
So all of my DNS stuck around, and I can change it and everything like normal. I think I can even buy domains elsewhere and use Dreamhost as my DNS server for them.
The one complaint I have with them is that their forgot password scheme is "email your password in plaintext", which makes me feel a little bit like my domains aren't safe. So if I were to find my ideal registrar (~$10, not evil, decent interface, free DNS), I'd switch for that reason.
I use uk2.net and daily.co.uk
Reliable. Don't know of any sopa stance.
It is true, Gandi does charge slightly more for domains than some other registrars. We do feel that we are still affordable, however. The reason we need to charge a small premium is that we have a different business model than other, larger companies, and cannot get by on razor-thin margins. We are a commercial organization, certainly, and we do make money, but we also support the community of innovators in the hosting and domain name management space, and we do not advertise, but rely on word of mouth for our marketing. We do not buy market share with ads, and we do not make empty promises to capture customers. We also include some services (such as a free year of SSL certificates and the ability to obfuscate your whois data) that other registrars tend to charge incrementally for. This is because we believe that your data is yours. We will never sell your private information as some others do, and so we do not have that revenue stream.
We appreciate your willingness to consider Gandi as an ethical, no-bullshit alternative to GoDaddy. Right now a lot of domains are available at $8/yr through the end of 2011. We hope you will join us.
Seemed like a very reasonable response. I've been happy with them for the past few months with a few new domains. Just finished transferring all my existing GoDaddy domain names to Gandi.net.
It's not the best interface, but the price/performance is fine, and I don't have to go hunting for coupons every few months. They've not modified prices in the 2+ years I've been there.
Basically: They opt customers in to a "service" where they show ads on any subdomain they haven't setup a DNS record for. Name.com keeps all the money, but the TOS says that you are responsible for making sure that they content that they choose to display on your domain is legal.
They have .coms at $9.75, accepts Amex and has auto-renew. I've never been let down by this company.
I've had a domain registration with TuCows, now Hover, for over a decade. No problems. A bit pricier than Namecheap, where I have some other domain registrations.
As for Namecheap, they've been immediately responsive, the few times I've needed customer support. My problems were nothing difficult, though.
I'm glad Namecheap switched their site to be entirely SSL/TLS, a couple of years ago. (Formerly, they only encrypted the payment process, with obvious implications.)
P.S. DomainDirect. That's the missing name. They were a TuCows company. They turned into or assets were acquired by Hover. Transition was smooth. As far as I know, still Canadian (though with the attendant U.S. baggage associated with .com, .org, .net and such).
On a separate note, I think they're a lightning rod for the anti-SOPA crowd now. GoDaddy is now an example for other SOPA supporters
Of course there could be no level of 'customer' rational discourse at all they could just be trying to mitigate the damage and move on. But one would like to believe they could be trained by rewarding them for good behavior.
Just sayin'
It serves as a lesson to other companies in the future. Unless GoDaddy becomes the most outspoken opponent of SOPA, their public opinion on the matter is irrelevant. Some companies need to be reminded that their actions have consequences. It's not much of a lesson if the only consequence of a poor decision is that they have to go delete old blog posts and make a meaningless gesture.
Let me state that again: You are under no obligation to pat them on the back so they don't feel sad that customers are still leaving and so go back to their old ways. If it were that easy for them to reverse (again) this decision, do you think they warrant a pat on the back in the first place?
They are engaging in a craven, cynical ploy to retain customers. There are no market-rules you need to play by. If you think that GoDaddy still stinks after this quick shower, walk away.
And I for one think they still stink.
They may have changed their mind, but they only changed it after their original stupid decision pissed everybody off. If they lose money over it maybe they'll think things through a little better next time.
I went with name.com instead when moving from Godaddy today. Name.com is about the same price as Namecheap, and they do appear to have automatic billing. The only nicer thing about Namecheap was the cheap SSL certs you could get with a domain purchase.
Although it appears that GoDaddy were to be exempt from SOPA, so they were just pro-actively pushing a law that would only affect their competitors: http://idealab.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/12/sopa-hearing-wi...
We're really not this stupid.
Does this aggregate into hosting a DNS lookup service (hardware + bandwidth + support staff)? It still seems expensive for what it is.
I'm not familiar with GoDaddy's practices, but couldn't the volume of the transfer alone have triggered the call?