Alternatives to GoDaddy

[jbyers]

When migrating our company's 15 domains away from GoDaddy I evaluated around a dozen registrars. Our criteria may be different from yours. With millions of subdomains and tens of millions of user-generated pages, we needed a registar that would absolutely honor our rights as domain owners. This was our top priority. Our lowest priority was cost, though there was a reasonable upper bound on what we'd pay per year. Features are somewhere in the middle -- we didn't want or need lots of extras.

Our priorities were:

  1. rights as domain owners
  2. registar stability
  3. control panel usability
  4. extra features (DNS, etc.)
  5. cost

The winner was Gandi. Their combination of common-sense, customer-friendly terms and European privacy laws made the choice easy.

Read your registrar's terms. See if you still want to save that $6 a year.

[jotto]

i dropped gandi this year because they emailed me asking for 1) copy of drivers license, 2) proof of residence, and the current drivers license address must match whatever your current address is. they gave me 1 week to comply or face deletion of account. they claimed it was a regular/random check, but offered no answer to my questions other than "you must provide". i immediately transferred to name.com because they have a telephone number and they answer it. gandi does NOT have a support phone number.

[arkitaip]

And they keep your whois info private. http://www.gandibar.net/post/2008/07/08/Gandi-helps-guard-yo...

[rednaught]

FYI, They are also now incorporated in the US and comply with the Safe Harbor Act.

[sdfjkl]

And you can't beat their slogan: "no bullshit™" (http://www.gandi.net/no-bullshit)

[tomstuart]

Seconded. I've been a Gandi customer for 11 years and have never been less than delighted with the service they provide.

[AdamN]

All my new domains are on Gandi. Another advantage is their broad selection of TLDs. Domain names are too valuable to nickel and dime.

[ngsayjoe]

I used to use Gandi, but has since transferred all domains to Namecheap, becoz Gandi force you to use NIC handlers to login.

[callmeed]

I have 63 domains and 5 SSL certs with GoDaddy. While they're definitely not a favorite company, I don't hate them so much that I'm willing to go to the trouble of transferring everything.

If you really can't handle their upselling or bad UX, then just use their mobile site (http://godaddymobile.com) or iPad app.

If you have issues with Parsons or their way of doing business, fine–I get that. Otherwise, meh ... just buy your domains and get to work.

[newmediaclay]

I totally agree. We have over 100 domains and 10 SSL certs with GoDaddy. Sure it gets a little annoying opting out of upsells, setting the domains to manual renewal, and changing the registration to 1 year with every purchase, but it adds a net of maybe 15 seconds to the purchase. That's well worth the savings and the flexibility they actually provide through DNS controls.

Their customer service is great and you can always get in touch with someone if you need any kind of support. Also, the iPhone app is really great. I don't know why that doesn't get more attention, but it's the most powerful Domain or DNS management app I've seen out there.

Like Callmeed, if you want to avoid them 100% b/c of Parsons, then I respect that. Otherwise, they're a budget provider that does a good job when stacked up against other budget providers in different verticals.

[pavel_lishin]

You suggestion to avoid upselling is to buy an iPad, and their app for it?

[drivebyacct2]

You clearly have missed a lot when it comes to GoDaddy. You've made the same mistakes that many have made repeatedly. Everytime it's the same, "we thought we were fine, just hosting some domains", right before they have downtime because their hosting was suspended or DNS info dropped at a whim that GoDaddy acted upon with little short-term recourse.

It's not hard to transfer, that's just laziness.

[bodyfour]

A year or so ago I regretfully moved _to_ GoDaddy because they were one of the only registrars I could find that supported IPv6 glue records (i.e. you run your own nameservers with IPv6 connectivity, so a lookup of example.com also returns an IPv6 address for ns1.example.com)

Many of the smaller players just go through OpenSRS which at least recently only could add IPv6 glue with manual intervention. Maybe they've (finally) fixed that by now.

I would like to get back off GoDaddy someday soon, but I've been worried that my IPv6 glue will break. Does anybody know a registrar with solid IPv6 experience?

[treitnauer]

We've started building a new domain management service at http://iWantMyName.com and we're bootstrapped, profitable and proud as 37signals would say... ;)

Here is some more background information from a co-founder perspective:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2448717

[mariorz]

I've been using this for a while, the site is beautiful, simple and fast, it's like the anti-godaddy in the best possible way. the online support is also some of the best I've experienced. really great job guys.

[rednaught]

I had looked at your site some months ago but saw you were a reseller for 1 API at the time. Are you guys ICANN accredited now?

[ebcase]

Through our work on Domainr (http://domai.nr/ -- a domain availability search engine) I've gotten to know folks at:

  - iWantMyName (Timo already posted in this thread)
  - 101domain
  - Dreamhost
  - DNSimple

...and I'd personally recommend all of them, for having solid services, ethical business practices, and good design (for iWMN and DNSimple). I've also heard good things about Namecheap and Gandi from a few friends.

[timerickson]

Just wanted to say I love Domainr. Thanks.

[systems]

Just out of curiosity, I whoised some domains and

    google , yahoo & facebook are something called markmonitor
    microsoft is using melbourneit
    oracle is using tucows
    ycombinator is using easyDNS

interesting

[ez77]

What I don't understand is that Google, being an accredited ICANN registrar [1], is not its own registrar, just like Go Daddy or Name.com.

[1] http://www.icann.org/en/registrars/accredited-list.html

[carterschonwald]

what about nearlyfreespeach.net ? I'm surprise no one has mentioned them. I've been quite happy with them and they're seemingly on the pretty aggressive side of nice pricing and digital rights.

[luckyeights]

I've never found a more honest company. For example, they recently discovered a billing error that amounted to $56 over 5 years .. so they refunded everyone double, donated what they couldn't refund to charity, and apologized profusely. (http://blog.nearlyfreespeech.net/2011/04/07/a-small-billing-...)

[pkamb]

My one criticism of NFS is that there's no way to save a credit card on file. Certainly makes those "inspiration struck, better go register the domain" purchases much more of a have-to-pull-out-the-wallet ordeal... but maybe making random domains more annoying to buy is actually a good thing.

[fbuilesv]

I'm not entirely sure of how it works these days, but when I used to host sites there they required you to host your sites on NFS if you wanted to qualify for the cheap domain registrations.

[namank]

Namecheap is an awesome registrar.

For hosting, try JustHost.com. Excellent customer service.

[newchimedes]

I just went with Namecheap. I'm moving all my domains all of GoCrappy. GoDaddy is not only a mess to use, but it also costs a lot more.

[rytis]

I'm now gradually migrating all domains off GoDaddy (just waiting for them to expire), so this list comes in quite handy.

I'm moving to https://www.dynadot.com/, but no one has mentioned it here. Prices are ok, UI is simple. DNS management is simple too, so probably will not suit everyone. No upselling. So far I'm liking them, but bear in mind, I'm only few months with them.

Just wondering if anyone has any experience with DynaDot and how they compare to others on the list (especially Gandi, as it looked quite interesting)?

[davidjade]

I've used them a few years now and have been really happy. Not feature-rich but they cover the basics and have reasonable prices with no upsell pressure.

[stock_toaster]

I have also been using dynadot for a few years. No problems here.

[mieses]

Dreamhost can be used for purely name registration and DNS. http://wiki.dreamhost.com/Domain_Registration

[kenjackson]

1&1 might be better than GoDaddy, but not by much. Avoid them if possible.

[paulirish]

I've heard rough things about their hosting but their domain mgmt has been painless. Really enjoy private domain registration for free.

[ajhit406]

We use Dnsimple. It's not Cheap, but if you have a bunch of domains it's incredibly helpful and just gets out of the way and works. For some reason propogation of changes is always seems faster too.

For all our super cool (.io) domains, we use iwantmyname. No frills, fantastic support and simple UI.

[petercooper]

I use several registrars for various reasons but so far NameCheap have been my favorite. They're on the list but wanted to give them a thumbs up here. No nonsense from them and their free "WHOIS guard" is a nice touch.

[chris24]

NameCheap's great. They're pretty quick and cheap. They also offered a free PositiveSSL cert with new domain registrations & transfers for awhile too.

[kelleyk]

I switched from Godaddy to Moniker a little while back---quick, easy to use, and price-competitive. They're outside the US (in Canada), too.

[freejack]

Moniker is in Florida and their parent co. has offices in NY, Portland and Germany.

[kiplinger]

Honestly, as a freelancer, if you want to keep your domains and email on GD, that is fine with me. Their shared hosting is so inexcusably slow and difficult to manage,it makes me wonder why there hasn't been a class action lawsuit against them. Hyperbole, I know, but they suck at hosting! IF a potential client has space up there, the first thing I do is have them move it.

[andrewtj]

For a simple registrar that supports DNSSEC I've been quite happy with https://www.gkg.net/. Their prices are reasonable and their site is quick and functional, though it's navigation is a bit clumsy. I can't comment on their hosting (including DNS) as I've not used it.

[nodata]

NameCheap for SSL certs, dd24 for domains (http://www.domaindiscount24.com/?language=en)

Edit: scrub that: gandi are the same price for SSL certs, and have a better interface for domains. Switched!

[skysurfer172]

I've been happy with Dotster for my domain registration and some DNS management and have been slowly moving domains over from GD to them. Anyone else have input on Dotster?

[canassa]

I am transferring my domains from GoDaddy to Dynadot (http://www.dynadot.com), so far I have no complains.