The article answers its own question. It's hard because it's a commodity business. Customer acquisition costs eat up all the margin. Trying to differentiate the product costs money which would result in raising prices, which results in losing customers, most of whom choose on price and then complain about quality. So, it's a race to the bottom - everyone trying to cut costs (other than marketing) to the bare minimum so they can reduce prices as far as possible. All the money goes to marketing, and none goes into improving the quality of the offering.
It's very similar to airlines. We all complain about bag fees and charging for meals or extra legroom, but it's we the customers who have driven them there by making price our primary, if not sole, criteria for vendor selection.
> It's hard because it's a commodity business
...
>All the money goes to marketing, and none goes into improving the quality of the offering.
Personally, i disagree that all commodity businesses need to be that way. Higher quality and lower prices (/especially/ lower prices) are marketing in and of themselves. For most of the time I've been in business, my model has been to take the marketing costs and just apply those to discounts.
Now, this is much easier in the VPS business than in the registrar business, 'cause as far as I can tell, the VPS business is much higher margin. Really, it's pretty easy, in this market, to differentiate yourself on price, just because retail prices are so much higher than the cost of goods sold.
when you sell a .com domain, the lowest your costs can ever be is $6.25 a year (or, at least that's what it was last time I looked) and the retail prices aren't that much higher than that, so without using domains as a loss leader, it's pretty difficult to differentiate yourself through price. Heck, considering the margin there, if you have much by way of customer acquisition costs or /any/ customer support costs, you are either charging an uncompetitive rate or you are losing money (and needing to make it up somewhere else)
I think the problem with the domain registrar business is that instead of costs being dominated by equipment or something else where you can innovate (or that just automatically becomes dramatically cheaper year over year) costs are dominated by administrative fees you have to pay the next guy up the chain.
>Personally, i disagree that all commodity businesses need to be that way. Higher quality and lower prices (/especially/ lower prices) are marketing in and of themselves.
So your argument could have been phrased 'Personally, i disagree that all commodity businesses are really commodity businesses'?
What you were actually challenging was his characterization of domain registration as a commodity business; I don't disagree with you there, I just wanted your point clarified.
>So your argument could have been phrased 'Personally, i disagree that all commodity businesses are really commodity businesses'?
Well, no. It's a continuum, rather than a black and white thing. I wrote a long argument then edited it back to the wikipedia quote, as that mostly sums things up.
My business is more 'commodity' I think, than slicehost, mostly because of the marketing angles we take. Obviously, the market for a certain grade of steel is far more of a commodity, though I suspect that if I knew more about that market, I'd find it was less than an absolute commodity.
I pay $15 / year for no-ip (they're a reseller) because they have good service. I'm glad to pay the difference.
Of course, one way they get away with a higher price is that they primarily sell DNS services. So it may be more expensive to pay with them, but it's also more convenient to have them handle both DNS and registration. (though I currently use their free domain service for some of those domains).
NearlyFreeSpeech is, IMO, the only registrar worth using.
It is simple, and the site is clean to a fault. There is zero advertising or service upselling - each page contains what it needs to and nothing else.
They're not the place to go to get cute with your TLDs, but for the standard TLDs, I refuse to go anywhere else. Even well-liked registrars like NameCheap are a big pile of spam in comparison.
They're $8.99/year now? I can't believe I am still using namecheap. I watched NearlyFreeSpeech go to bat for a friend that was being sued over a trademark dispute. Even though he was prevented from using the domain commercially in a court of law, NearlyFreeSpeech still registers it for him and lets him have a blank page. The people suing him were pissed off.
While the domain costs $8.99/year, you have to "deposit" money to your account that the cost is subtracted from, and if you do it with a credit card there is a small fee associated. I think you can deposit $10.00, from which they take $1.00, then they give you a $0.25 "rebate", leaving you with $0.26 in your account once you've paid for the domain. It varies depending on how much you deposit, but in general I just think of it as more like $10.00/year for a domain.
That being said, I'd pay a lot more than that just for their clean (although slightly dated looking) interface. I'll be switching the rest of my domains to them in another month or so.
nearlyfreespeech is primarily a hosting service, with the distinction that you only pay for the storage and bandwidth that you actually use. So the way they bill you is, you put say $20 into your account with them and they'll deduct small amounts at a time from that.
I guess most people using their registrar service also use them as a host, so it makes sense to pay for it in the same way.
Last time I checked, about a year or so ago, they weren't very keen on people using them only as a registrar. Not "you'll get your account terminated", just a "please don't do this if you don't have to". That said, I've got a domain (or two?) registered there. Yes, I do feel guilty about it!
You are probably referring to this[1] FAQ entry. As I understand it they provide domain registration on a cost-recovery basis and thus have no incentive to answer support requests for customers who only use NFSN for domain registration. I wouldn't conclude that this means "please don't do this if you don't have to".
When you use NFSN for domain registration, you will probably also pay for whois privacy ($3.65/year) and DNS services. DNS services for domains registered with NFSN are $1.22/year, but if you host the website for that domain at NFSN you will only pay $0.41/year. So they do actually earn money on domain-only customers and they also give you an incentive to use them not just for domain registration.
I'm quite content with versio.nl (sadly only for dutch-speaking folk).
It costs me around 8~9€ for a .com domain for a year, and around 15€ for a year of hosting (1.5G space, 20G bandwidth, 25 subdomains, etc).
I'm not sure exactly what you mean, but I was able to quickly and painlessly update my MX records for all the domains I have with them to my Google Apps setup. I recently noticed that Google Apps even setup a custom how-to page for NFSN users: http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?answer=54719
I've tried NearlyFreeSpeech, Gandi, Joker and InterNetworX. Gandi and Joker are expensive, inwx is so-so and NFS is cheap but has an extremely limited selection of TLDs. NFS and Joker have terrible interfaces, Gandi's is somewhat nice, however it's just way too big, inwx's is nice (somewhat unintuitive, but fast and compact). Joker makes accidentally deleting something hard, inwx makes it way too easy. Gandi pollutes your default zone file, NFS puts a SPF record there (which I like).
If you've just a few .com domains and don't need a registrar outside the US, use NFS. Otherwise, for the time being, I'd recommend inwx.
It's a great, reliable DNS service in my experience, more geared toward hackers than the GoDaddy crowd (e.g. you can edit your DNS records directly with fine-grained control over TTL).
I've had great luck with dyndns.com too. They charge ~double ($15) what GoDaddy does for domain reg but the service has been solid in the 8 or so years I've used them.
I use them for my domain registration. You don't get any freebies from them (DNS service, private registration, etc. cost extra), but there are real people on the other end.
Another positive is that their site is entirely garbage-free, and they're not constantly trying to sell you something. I get the impression that they mostly do domain registration as a value-add for their DNS and other infrastructure-as-a-service customers.
Perhaps it's not that it's hard to be good but rather it's far more lucrative to be bad?
I recently moved all my domains from GoDaddy to http://internet.bs because they don't do any funny stuff, they're very inexpensive, and they're outside the jurisdiction of belligerent and unfriendly Western governments.
If you want to be out of the jurisdiction of western governments make sure you are also buying domain names that are out of that jurisdiction (.com et al.).
I use GoDaddy for all of my domains and I don't understand what all of the complaints are about. I may host 40ish domains through them, and I've never had a problem with price, support or control over any of my domains.
These days it seems like leaving GoDaddy is the cool thing to do. If a company's marketing tactics or a CEO's out-of-office actions put you off, then that's one thing, but as for the product itself and how well it performs: GoDaddy performs as well as anything else I've seen for what I consider a fair price.
(Their hosting, however, is a totally different story…)
this is true. I have more than 100 domains through them across various accounts. The service works, the only complaint I have is that to change something in DNS record, it takes at least 30 clicks to get through all their crap. However if I would have to choose again my domain registrar, it would be probably NearlyFreeSpeech.net, they are way cooler than GoDaddy.
It makes me wonder why Google doesn't create a registrar service. Not to make money - perhaps they'd even run at a loss - but to offer a service that doesn't make you hate yourself every time you have to interact with them.
Considering the fact that Google depends on a rich, diverse internet (rather than a clumped, Facebook-y internet), this seems like a natural move for them.
Yes, they would still be the worst thing! I know, I used to use Godaddy, for my sins.
Strike one: I messaged their support asking when they'd get a usability expert to look at their awful interface. Response was basically "get used to it". So don't expect it ever to change.
Strike two: the maddeningly pervasive upselling. Wading through 500KB pages of desperate attempts to sell you hosting, SSL certs, and steak knives sapped most of my will to live.
Strike three: Trying to spin hunting a endangered species in a corrupt banana republic as a heroic and selfless deed
made me vomit.
YOU'RE OUT, GODADDY! And I feel so much cleaner now my domains are with Namecheap.
I've been using DynaDot.com myself, prices seem decent. originally picked them because they took paypal (i had some free money in a paypal account from selling my opinion). Haven't used them for dns so i don't know if they do any funny stuff though like some users report other registrars doing.
I've moved all my domains over to DynaDot (with them over 3 years total). I use DynaDot's DNS for some of my domains and they don't do any funny stuff. Haven't had any problems with DNS outages, transferring domains--in or out, or any billing issues. Their interface is fairly straightforward and clean.
Domain Name:WIKILEAKS.ORG
Created On:04-Oct-2006 05:54:19 UTC
Last Updated On:17-Dec-2010 01:57:59 UTC
Expiration Date:04-Oct-2018 05:54:19 UTC
Sponsoring Registrar:Dynadot, LLC (R1266-LROR)
+1 for Dynadot. I've used them for a few years now with no complaints. Clean simple web interface, good DNS features, volume discount. They do have 9/6 phone support rather than 24/7.
Totally agree. They make setting everything up a snap. They've got presets for most of the services you might use on the web and if you want to customize your DNS records, the editor is very nice.
I use Tucows OpenSRS (I'm a reseller, but otherwise, just find someone reasonable who is a reseller -- it used to be free to join, then $100, now I think $250).
Basically direct access to both a website and an API for registry functions. If you register enough domain names internally, it's totally worth it. I've never had a problem with them.
They started out as a linux-friendly ISP in Canada, I believe, and have become basically a reasonable registrar -- one of the first group of 34 independent registrars approved by ICANN, and I think the first to really work with resellers.
Hover, which Marco suggests, seems to be a retail part of Tucows.
I've used SRSPlus for years and my only complaints are with their DNS hosting. It sometimes fails for a few minutes at a time, returning no results for a simple dig. I've personally noticed it 2-3 times in the last year so I can only imagine how much it actually happens. There's also no support for TXT records or anything else aside from A, CNAME, and MX.
I've been considering a switch to Hover, but haven't done a trial run yet.
I'm not a fan of Hover though I have all my domains registered with them right now. They store your password in cleartext and their website is downright bizarre - it wants to be iGoogle, I guess.
They're less obnoxious than GoDaddy but that's not saying much.
They email your password to you when you use the "forgot" form.
I notified support about this and the representative said he agrees that it's a security flaw and that he had "sent it up the chain", although this was last year.
Despite this, they're still my preferred registrar.
The article stated: "and it can cause an hours-long DNS outage if it’s not done perfectly.".
The only case where there would be any dns outage is if the registrar is handling the dns. If the registrar isn't doing the dns there is zero dns outage. Part of the transfer process is that the old dns automatically gets carried over.
(I am an ICANN Accredited registrar one of the first..)
I think what people have to understand is that all registrars pay the same price for domains. Whether you are godaddy or the smallest. (The other costs are fixed). So I think it is obvious that you aren't going to have "price quality speed" all from the same place. Additionally registrars charging no money are either making money elsewhere or they are going to go out of business or using domains as a loss leader.
For maximum safety from registrar screwing up, don't put your main domain name in the glue records either, just ns1.example.com.
But, it appears to be in the registrar's best interest to not encourage users to run their own DNS server -- as the article points out, that contributes to their lockin.
I keep my domains at pairnic — they're a geeky small company, but they're good enough to do the trick. Granted you can get all of the fancy domains, but what I've learned is that less is more when going to register a domain.
I too finally moved away from GoDaddy and had trouble finding a good domain registrar. I ended up going with EasyDNS after I saw how they handled being wrongly associated with pulling Wikileak's domain.
The reason is because it's a very difficult and competitive market and the step up from good to excellent customer service isn't worth the extra cost.
You can go for low-cost, high-volume (GoDaddy and most others) or high-end, higher cost, lower volume (Network Solutions and a few more).
Because the end user experience of getting a domain - as you point out - is pretty much of buying and then only very occasionally making changes, there is no real middle market. Every registry charges a wholesale price and you can charge only a tiny margin before you are priced out the market.
The reason that good registrars get worse, ironically, is because they become successful. Once you start dealing with larger and larger volumes, it gets harder to maintain your customer service and price.
And the one thing that you don't hear about - but registrars will tell you privately - is that as soon as you get broader public awareness you end up with really difficult customers who chew up alot of time, are usually wrong, or have a complete misunderstanding of how it works, and make life difficult for your customer service teams. It's the curse of being popular in a commodity market.
In that sense, GoDaddy does a good job balancing price with level of customer service given the huge numbers of interactions it has to deal with.
Personally, I have my domains split over a number of different companies: GoDaddy (US), Heart Internet (UK), Network Solutions (US) and Blacknight (Ireland). If anything I'd give Heart Internet the edge.
I don't think I agree with the article. I moved from my old registrar to namecheap because my registrar really sucked (and yet I consider it better than GoDaddy). I didn't move immediately, I moved the next year, but I planned the move and before the domains re-new I hit the transfer button. While it was a little bit awkward, it was completely worth the time.
If I found a better service than namecheap, then I'll happily move to them the next year.
I've been dealing with at least 6-7 registrars during the years – all the way back to Network Solutions – both professionally and for personal use, and honestly never had any real problems with any of them. I've always avoided and advised others to avoid the cheapest options though. They might work fine for just an email address or website forwarder, but do you really want to trust a serious business to a company called GoDaddy?
Just don't ever forgot to prolong a domain name – keep your (company's) contract information up to date.
My personal domains are hosted at Gandi. They seem most aligned with the open-source philosophy and community, and they feel geek-friendly and less corporate and spam-like. They are located in Europe, which somehow makes me feel safer regarding DMCA take-downs or whatever suing troll pops up from nowhere. I don't feel very strongly about it, but I am happy with their services.
As I already said, I've never had any difficulties with any of the major registrars, so it doesn't really surprise me that most people don't have strong opinions or incentives to change.
I am implementing some domain monitoring tools on my site, ParkedAvenue, and this gives me a good idea. I will monitor my customer's domains, and then will be able to let them know when they are up for renewal, and hopefully offers an easy for them to migrate to better registrars!
I'm always surprised in these conversations that Dreamhost never gets mentioned. I've had nothing but great experiences with them for registrar work. They also have $15 SSL certs that cover both the root and the www subdomain. And one of the things I love most about them is how easy they make it to leave, should you ever decide to do that.
I'd love to know why the op was downvoted. I've only had experience with Dreamhost and they've always been good, but then again, I'm not even sure what I'm supposed to be looking for. So any explanation would really come in handy.
I have all my domains with Dotster. They're a little expensive, and over the years their site has gotten spammier looking (always have to say no to the add-ons when buying a domain, no I do not need shitty hosting), but I first signed up with them in all the way back in 2000, and like the article says - the lockin is pretty high. All my domains are on auto-renew on my credit card, and I only login to their site maybe about once a year?
Never had any noticeable outages or anything with them, but I don't have any big sites either, just personal stuff. I've never had to contact their customer support, so I don't know if it's good or bad. Occasionally I think about switching to someplace a few dollars cheaper, but most of the registrars that don't have reputations for horrible customer support tend to be near the same price ($15ish/year) so I haven't bothered.
I register all of my domains a Dreamhost—they're a hosting company and their core business is not registration. No problems testing domain availability, no squatted urls even after things expire. Reg. is something like $10, and I'm not going to sweat $1 - $2 over the piece of mind.
Can someone correct me on this: was hover originally called mail bank or name bank? And had a practice of registering peoples last names as domains? I recall this because I tried to register my last name through mail bank in 1998 and they registered it for themselves...
Are you talking about netidentity? They were bought by tucows a while ago and then merged with other divisions to become hover. I'm a hover customer and never had any problems...
I just recently transferred all of my domains over from GoDaddy to Moniker, which was relatively painless with their site heavily oriented around bulk transfers. Although the control panel could be better, it is sooo much better than GoDaddy's. When I logged in to GoDaddy to transfer these domains, not having logged in for quite some time, and with their ever changing, incredibly busy design, it took me a good 60 seconds or so to even find the link to the 'domain manager'.
The whole elephant incident alone wouldn't have made me switch, but after wanting to try something new for some time, that was all I needed to put the effort in to finding someone else.
I've been moving my domains from godaddy to moniker as well... for some time now b/c of the better control panel. Plus, domains bought in the snapnames aftermarket can be moved to (and sold from) from your moniker account.
Following several recommendations I got on HN, I've moved all my domains to Namecheap. It's been pretty solid thus far; haven't had any real issues that I can think of. It'd be nice if their site was a bit less spammy, though.
The DNS and email forwarding interfaces are quirky (especially if you're trying to manage multiple domains at once). But, hey, they don't charge for those.
original comment:
Yeah, except if you use them for dns -- which I prefer to leave on my registrar -- they're assholes who spam everyone who mistypes a subdomain. Better yet, they throw ads on there and pocket the money. Cute, right?
I use omnis.com, and I wish they promoted the domain name angle of their services separately from the rest of their hosting.
The purchase process is straightforward, little upselling (no, I never want hosting or privacy protection!), and the prices remain the same each year, unlike godaddy which gets you at a low price then has higher renewal prices. Example - all my renewing domains are >$10 at godaddy, but omnis.com are $8.25. I'm getting a discount from omnis because I have >50 with them now.
I'm working on a registrar that just focuses on domains. I want to be the Chipotle of domain registrars. Life has been happening and putting me behind, but if you are interested I'd love some more people to e-mail when I finish it: http://nameptr.com
Sorry for the shameless plug... but this the third or fourth post I've seen, and I had to mention that I am working on something :)
"Today’s registrars compete on price. nameptr.com’s goal will not be to compete on price, but on the user’s experience."
This won't work. You either have to charge more than people will be willing to pay or sell them things they need (or don't need). You can't make money doing what you are doing.
It's just a fact about the industry - I can confirm having previously worked for a domain registration company. Low margin business as end users compare on price (e.g. when looking for "domain" on Google) - features (mostly) don't matter.
The trick is not to evaluate registrars who play the price game, you get what you pay for.
joker.com - 10+ years now, over 100 domains, referred dozens of people, never a problem.
Edit: to add to this, don't host your DNS at a shitty domain registrar and then complain about it later. Get a proper DNS host like easydns. Keep the two separate
Oh, and you can’t delete a GoDaddy account. (Really
makes you want to sign up, right?) But you can cancel
all of your purchased products in it, remove all of your
payment information, and change all required contact
fields (email, mailing address, phone, etc.) to fake values. ↩
i used iwantmyname.com recently. it seems to be a pretty easy to use website and most importantly for me was that they had .io domain names. the service has been first rate, i typically get responses relatively quickly.
"In" doesn't necessarily lend itself to snappy English phrases like "to" does. It might also be confused with the gerund, especially when spoken - do I go to meet.in or meet.ing? And what's your company/product called?
And are there additional restrictions on Indian domains? Not sure. For example, last time I checked, only Americans could register .us domains.
it is a great tld (I have one and a whole project that could be formed around it, just dont have the time to get it done. I need a Zed Shaw crash course on getting shit done).
Ok, I'll bite... First, if you liked the "commercial", you need to know a little background. Elephants are an endangered species because poachers kill them for their ivory, and they are protected in most countries. Only in Zimbabwe, a totally corrupt state that has pretty much collapsed, was Parsons able to get permission to "hunt" elephants. His attempt to spin it as a heroic and humanitarian act was pathetic. There are several measures you can take to prevent elephants straying into cropland, all costing a fraction of what Parsons will have paid to stage his stunt. So all up, there's not much to like.
Second, this doesn't make GoDaddy a terrible company. But it does mean that their CEO has terrible judgement. For most people, the elephant slaughter was the straw that broke the camel's back. We had endured the awful user interface and saturation upselling for years, but for all the reasons explained in the comments above, we didn't switch our domains. But I'm dammed if I'm going to pay a cent more to such a narcissistic idiot.
Finally, if you still like the idea of hosting at GoDaddy, go for it - that's your choice, and I respect it. Good luck!
I've had nothing but good experiences with iWantMyName [1]. My experience with them and GoDaddy has been like night and day. They provide simple, reasonably priced and to the point registration and management. Couldn't be happier with them.
myself also.. definitely would recommend for simplicity and cleanliness of interface. I've been steadily moving all my domains from gandi to iwantmyname for a while now... they also have all the tlds
To answer Marco's question: It is hard to be a good domain registrar but not impossible.
Let me tell you my little personal story about bootstrapping iWantMyName. I left Germany at the end of 2007 after working for a German domain registrar for nearly 6 years. We were successful (2 million domains under management) and the big ones GoDaddy, NetSol, eNom, Register.com etc. just started registering ccTLDs (country code top-level domains) through us.
But something didn't feel right... Domain registrars were getting lots of bad press (frontrunning, parking) and I started thinking of building a new domain management service. In the meantime I moved to Australia and after 6 months of being with an Australian registrar, I had enough. It was time to finally take the plunge. So I moved from Australia to New Zealand where we launched iWantMyName with zero dollar investment in December 2008. I knew one of my co-founders from Germany (luckily he was the former CTO of a registrar back in Germany and had enough of Europe too).
The first year was hard. Really fucking hard. We still had to do some consulting jobs to survive and our service could do nothing but register domains. No transfers, only certain DNS record types were supported, no whois updates. But for me it was really surprising how few features people actually need. Our site architecture helps to keep design work at a minimum level too, it's intentionally kept simple. Actually, we don't even have a designer in our team.
So where are we now a bit more than 2 years later? Well, we're running a profitable domain management service which generates six figures in revenue. This currently supports three founders, one employee and every single cent that's left will go into improving the user experience. No upselling, no annoying ads, no parking crap, auctions and what have you. We have decided not to compete on price, features or add crappy hosting
services but only to give customers what they really need and that is purchasing / managing domains. Having said that, there's still lots of room for improvement and we will not stop until we've build the domain registrar Marco is looking for.
Awesome! I've been looking at moving all my domains (.com and .co/org.nz to IWMN for a while - the fact that you're a kiwi with a customer focussed bootstrapped startup might just tip the scales :)
I understand subscribing to bad registrars. I mean, I don't really understand why people ignore all of the evidence against GoDaddy until it bites them in the ass, but it seems to happen a lot.
I may never understand though, why people are using the registrar's provided DNS services. I shudder writing that sentence. It just makes no sense.
It's very similar to airlines. We all complain about bag fees and charging for meals or extra legroom, but it's we the customers who have driven them there by making price our primary, if not sole, criteria for vendor selection.