Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/

[Serena Fenton <fents AT ibiblio.org>]

gandi.net  is reaaly cheap $10.00 per year - the support is almost 
non-existant.  The spam is very light (one peice every few weeks) and 
tends to be in French or Spanish.

 - Serena



Steven Champeon wrote:
> on Wed, Sep 04, 2002 at 02:58:13AM -0400, Bob Kucera wrote:
>
> > How worthwhile is domain name registration? 
>
>
> As a way to accelerate aging, it works great.
>
>
> > It seems like a good way to spend some money on my tech habit. Is
> > there a preferred registrar for a domain name and dns service?
>
>
> Not really. In my experience, they all suck in some ways, and it's a matter
> of finding one that sucks less in the ways that matter most to you.
>
>  NSI: evil monopolist, despite "competition"
>  register.com: I switched to register from NSI and for a week, they had
>   excellent customer service, which they promptly outsourced to a firm
>   that knows nothing and has no access to the systems you're calling to
>   complain about.
>  joker.com: heard good things. cheap. 
>  godaddy.com: silly name. heard good things. 
>  dotster: it's not spam if you're a customer, even if they send it
>   once a day for a year.
>
> Don't use .nu, as they charge more for individual acts of necessary
> maintenance (such as updating your name servers or contact info, which
> is done automatically via Web forms anyway) than for the initial
> registration.
>
> There are dozens of other registrars. Most of them don't even provide
> a working whois service (port 43 tcp), which is the basic requirement
> for accreditation by ICANN. Apparently, ICANN only cares about NSI and
> dundjerski.com, not about the fact that godaddy.com's /own whois record/
> lacks IP addresses for its primary and secondary dns servers. Or that
> dotster's is the same way. Or that namezero gives '111-111-1111' as
> their phone number. 
>
> Whois is a joke. ICANN is a joke.
>
> Domain registration is an administrative nightmare and policy sinkhole.
>
>
> > it looks like the thing to do is to roll up my sleeves and really
> > research them by cost of registration, services provided, cost of dns
> > registration is an add-on (I suppose to be researched separately), and
> > I wonder which of these companies will drop out of business and leave
> > me having to change registrars.
>
>
> Tip: domain names are cheap. Don't think you're saving anything by going
> with the $5/yr registrar versus the $35/yr registrar; you're not. The
> only problem is that support from the $35/yr registrar will likely cost
> you thousands of dollars a year if you have any significant investment
> in their services, as you'll spend your time in limbo on hold here on
> earth. The benefit is that you get to go straight to heaven when you
> die, and you'll never see an NSI support rep again (they have their own
> circle of hell set aside, I am quite sure).
>
> Also, if you're registering multiple domains, check the registrar to
> see if you will have to edit /every single record/ every time you change
> any information about a contact. register.com, for example, has no way
> of modifying a contact handle - if I have fifty domains registered to
> 'hostmaster AT hesketh.net' (and I do) and I need to change the contact
> mailing address, I have to do it on /all fifty/, one at a time. Feh.
>
> If I'd saved anything on registration fees, and I didn't, the savings
> would have been eroded right there. As I didn't save anything but hassle
> and the gnawing discomfort at supporting an unresponsive monopolist,
> as it was I was out some hours /and/ the fuzzy good feeling I got from
> dumping NSI, where I could have accomplished the update in a few minutes,
> via automated email-template processes, instead of dicking with a Web
> form, over and over and over.
>
> Like I said, you need to find the registrar that least offends your most
> important sensibilities.


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Serena Fenton      fents AT ibiblio.org
ibiblio: formerly known as metalab...sunsite.unc.edu...
digital archivist  ---->  http://www.ibiblio.org/

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