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Ask HN: When should you migrate to a 'top tier' registrar, and who are they?

9 points by preinheimer ↗ HN
This recent news about Zoho had a lot of people talking about moving to Mattermark or their competitors in the high end domain registration space.

When do you think about moving your registration over, and other than Mattermark who are the players in that space?

8 comments

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jaxtellerSoA
Neither Zoho, or Mattermark appear to registrars at all. So I am a bit confused by your question. TierraNet (the registrar) and Zoho had a conflict/issue which resulted in Zoho being offline for awhile.

Personally for my domains I use Hover https://www.hover.com/. I have never had any issues with them.

preinheimer
I could have done a better job in my question, this is the Zoho story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18059792

And apparently I want "Markmonitor" not "Monitormark", who is actually a registrar:

> whois ebay.com Domain Name: EBAY.COM Registry Domain ID: 1959284_DOMAIN_COM-VRSN Registrar WHOIS Server: whois.markmonitor.com Registrar URL: http://www.markmonitor.com

> whois amazon.com Domain Name: AMAZON.COM Registry Domain ID: 281209_DOMAIN_COM-VRSN Registrar WHOIS Server: whois.markmonitor.com Registrar URL: http://www.markmonitor.com

> whois nytimes.com Server Name: NYTIMES.COM IP Address: 170.149.168.134 Registrar: MarkMonitor Inc. Registrar WHOIS Server: whois.markmonitor.com Registrar URL: http://www.markmonitor.com

jaxtellerSoA
ICANN does a pretty good job of vetting domain registrar's, it isn't that easy to become one, and there are lot of hoops to jump through. If Zoho's claims are true, then they could file a complaint with ICANN. ICANN has the power to revoke TierraNet as a registrar if they see fit.
preinheimer
Even if TierraNet loses their registrar status as a result (which seems unlikely, there's plenty of bad registrar stories out there, those companies are still around), it doesn't help Zoho now: that outage has happened.

The goal with these higher end registrars is to avoid the first outage.

jaxtellerSoA
Fair enough.

I did some quick diging around. Seems like the 2 biggest players in the game are markmonitor.com and corporatedomains.com

I am not running a multi-million dollar site, but even if I were I am not sure I would switch from hover.com (owned by tucows.com) since they have been rock solid for me.

jamieweb
The Cloudflare Secure Registrar [1] looks really good. They also have a basic domain security checker [2].

I enquired about moving my domain registration to Cloudflare, however it is unfortunately only available for enterprise customers. Instead I went with Hover [3] who seem to be one of the best these days.

It's a shame that many 'consumer' domain registrars don't offer full registrar lock. I can kind of understand why registry lock would be reserved for higher-paying customers though.

[1] https://www.cloudflare.com/registrar/

[2] https://www.cloudflare.com/domain-security-check/

[3] https://www.hover.com/

jamieweb
Just 24 hours after writing this comment, Cloudflare have announced the Cloudflare Registrar, which is a security-first registrar that isn't just for big corporates.

It's currently in early access: https://www.cloudflare.com/registrar/

sadok
Awesome, thanks for the tip!