Ask HN: Which Domain Registrar Do You Use?

3 points by dylangs1030 ↗ HN
I hate GoDaddy, but I've been working with them for several years. I find the marketing to be very unprofessional, and it feels as though features either creep up in cost or have hidden fees.

What do you use, and why?

11 comments

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Gandi.net -- No BS registrar.
Gandi's contracts are an 11/10 on the BS scale; the "no BS" thing is marketing. You are agreeing to enforce their moral and ethical code upon yourself and your site visitors, and should you or your site visitors violate it, your domain can be confiscated.

Some excerpts:

http://www.gandi.net/static/contracts/en/g2/pdf/MSA-1.3-EN.p...

> By accepting Our Contracts and using Our services, You agree to abide to Our code of ethics which consists, in particular, of ... protecting and respecting minors, human dignity, public order and good moral standards, the fight against abusive and/or deviant uses of the Internet...

> You also commit Yourself to ensuring that any third party to whom You would ... grant any access or ability to modify any published Contents, will fully abide by the terms and conditions herein, and that You are able to effectively guarantee this commitment with regards to Gandi.

> You acknowledge and accept that the use of Our service is expressly forbidden for use in any way that engages or participates in practices that are deviant, abusive, illegal, or prejudicial...must be appropriate to the age and sensibility of each of the individuals that any of the content is destined for.

This kind of agreement is ridiculous for commodity domain registration. Nobody else asks that of you. You cannot reasonably run a blog with comments without breaching this contract (you can't enforce the code of ethics on commentors, which you guaranteed); don't even think of running a "hacker news" type site. Discussing hacking is one of the "deviant uses of the internet" you agreed to not only abstain from, but to actively fight.

dnscentral.com

simple and reliable, they host the name and let me set the pointers to the nameservers I use.

namecheap.com - absolutely no problems in the 2+ years I've been using them.
Another vote for NameCheap. Also, search for the monthly coupons.
I use gkg.net for grepular.com because they provide both an API and a web interface for adding your DNSSEC public keys to the parent zone.

I use badger.com for emailprivacytester.com because they gave me some free credit when they initially launched. Also, they have the nicest web interface I've seen for a domain registrar.

I use iwantmyname.com, I switched from godaddy a while ago. It was very easy to switch, I'd recommend it.
I'm a fan of both Hover.com and NameCheap.com. Both are great, however Hover focuses on just domains and I like their simpler interface and no hosting upsells and because whois privacy is factored into the domain price so I don't have to buy anything separate.

If you want to use my referral link, https://hover.com/puShQcGy or just http://hover.com if not. Hope it helps.

Moniker.com, they have great bulk domain management.