I have been a Go Daddy customer for about 5 years (wild guess). Somehow, I have managed to buy dozens of domain names through them, despite their constant efforts to prevent me from doing so. Their prices seem fine and their service seems good (I also have hosting, which seems to have excellent up-time and does fairly remarkable under traffic bursts). Their web site sucks, though.
The web site does more than suck. It slaps you in the face and tries to steal your lunch money. It pokes you in the eye, stands in your way, and then grabs onto your legs as you try to walk past.
Amazingly, the web site doesn’t lure you in before treating you like this. It does it from the second you walk in the door to the finish line, where the resilient somehow find a way to buy a product from them. If you go to the GoDaddy.com home page, you’re overwhelmed with one of the most cluttered and confusing landing pages on the planet. It takes a state-of-the-art computer with a state-of-the-art broadband connection to load the page without any hiccups.
The ordering process is the worst, though it seems like it might be one less step than it was 5 years ago. They fill up pages with hundreds of dollars of add-ons they want you to buy to go with the $10 domain. If you don’t scroll down to find the small “No thanks, continue to checkout” link at the bottom, you are unable to purchase the domain. If I’m logged in and have a PayPal account on-file, I should be able to search for a domain and buy with a few quick mouse clicks. Not so much with Go Daddy.
I know there are better registrars out there. People tell me about them all the time. However, I’m not going to jump ship until I find one that meets a few conditions.
My next registrar will need to be reputable. I need to be able to trust it. It needs to have a history and needs to come recommended.
My next registrar will need to have a good user experience. That’s why I will be leaving Go Daddy. Pages should load quickly and not strain my computer.
My next registrar will need to be accessible from my phone. Go Daddy’s site is too much for my iPhone’s CPU and cellular connectivity. Go Daddy has a mobile version, but it is crap. The deal breaker with it is that my saved accounts do not show up. I am not typing my credit card number on my phone with every purchase.
My next registrar will need to have competitive pricing. I’m not going to pay over $10/year for a .com domain. Period.
I would like for my next registrar to allow me to set default nameservers for new domains. I don’t know if any registrars have this. I usually forget to set the nameservers during the (cluttered and confusing) checkout process with Go Daddy, so I’m stuck with an ad-filled Go Daddy parked page until the second set of nameservers get propagated. And depending on where I’m hosting the site, I may have to enter as many as 4 nameservers. It would be nice not to have to do this every time.
My question to you is this: Who will/should my next registrar be?
I know I tweeted it but wanted it here for the masses to see ;)
http://namecheap.com is who I’ve used for years and years now – and everybody that asks I tell them to use them. I used to do a lot of domaining and more risque stuff and I had issues with content and names through other registrars with them either suspending my account or even at some (GD included) took away the domains without any reason or breach of terms (at the time they didn’t have anything in their terms that I broke).
I was recommended to namecheap a long time ago by some bigtime IT guys at the Planet and since I’ve moved everything over to a few accounts I’ve never looked back… NameCheap rocks and their admin panel is very simple and straight forward and unlike GD you don’t need to wait for cron to run every 15 minutes, the DNS changes are instant.
I’ve had one issue around this last summer (I have my registrar do all my dns, I don’t do it hosting side so if hosting goes down I still have MX fwd’d to gmail) and the had an email to me in 2 minutes with backup dns serves to use… my stuff was up in 2.5 minutes…
Anyways… try them out or at least have a look.
Chuck, I looked into it and they don’t have mobile accessibility. I’m not going to move my domains to a registrar that is just a little better. They need to be awesome.
Apparently, the person running the @namecheap account on Twitter is going to talk to the CTO about mobile accessibility.
I registered danielgreene.com with Network Solutions in 1998. I think back then they were the only registrar. I never even thought of requiring mobile access to a domain registrar, but I guess that’s a valid criterion these days. I just went to networksolutions.com on my G1 and it was not mobile-friendly. I Googled “networksolutions mobile version” and found networksolutions.mobi but it’s not a full-service site; it only lets you search for domains and get WHOIS info. Oh well, I tried to help. Happy hunting!
Daniel, Thanks for looking into it!