Over the past couple years, I've been slowly trying to migrate my domain registrations over to EV1's domain registry. It's not the easiest registrar in the world to use, but it's cheap at around $7 per domain. Unfortunately, they've stopped offering new registrations, so as my domains reach expiry at other registrars, I can't move them all to the same place in EV1.
So I'm considering moving to a new registrar. People say good things about GoDaddy, but they're still not the cheapest around. I've seen Yahoo's domain registration prices, and they look pretty reasonable. A yahoo domain only runs about $5 for a year. Yahoo is a good solid name on the internet. I really don't have to fear that Yahoo is going to suddenly stop offering domain registrations. I assume that they are already an accredited registrar (rather than using OpenSRS), or they would never be able to offer such low prices. Getting a domain from yahoo seems the cheapest way to go so far.I used to use DirectNIC for registration. Both EV1 and DirectNIC were using OpenSRS for registration. I suppose that they saw an ability to charge the same and make more money by becoming accredited registrars themselves. Sadly, DirectNIC bumped their priced up way too high for me - in the $15 range. I had to move.
GoDaddy is the name that keeps coming up, though. Is it because they spend their money to advertise their service? They're the ones with the racy superbowl ad where the big-boobed girl's top nearly falls off. I haven't heard anyone complain about their service, but they're $8 for a transfer and $9 for new domains. That's a lot more than Yahoo's $5 per domain. Still, GoDaddy has some additional services beyond domain registration that might make it worthwhile to use them over Yahoo.
For example, if you sign up for a non-domain service, they'll sell you domains for $4 each. That's pretty good, especially if the service is something that you would use. Their spam-blocking feature sounds pretty interesting. Also, GoDaddy offers SSL certificates through their site. I might be able to use that, too.
Besides that, I've always gotten a kind of oogy feeling from Yahoo, just generally. It's likethe Farmer's Market of internet services. It's basically a giant warehouse with dirty little 15'x15' stalls that sell mostly junk, pedalled by some dude in jeans, t-shirt, and leather vest who's got more tattoos than most carnie-folk. In the distance you can hear the bingo caller. You never know where you might find a great treasure, and yet the piles of crap you have to sift through to get it make its overall value questionable. And the only real difference between the Farmer's Market and Yahoo is that Yahoo lets you shuffle the stalls around to your liking, assuming you can find the controls to do it. That and Yahoo offers a bit more high-tech stuff.
I know there are other registrars out there. Primarily, I'm looking for someone who offers domains for cheap, is themselves ICANN-accredited (not OpenSRS), has a very easy to use management panel for renewing and setting DNS pointers, updates their records to the root servers immediately, and is generally a stable place for hosting all of my DNS records.
Any thoughts on that?
Yahoo's okay, but they seem to have some communication problems (re: the site I was managing there that suddenly went down and when we emailed about it they said we hadn't paid and the account had been killed since foreverago; the lady who owned the site had emailed them about her non-profit and they stopped charging her and then all this happened... it was all messed up). I don't remember their domain control panel being too organized or easy to use, either.
I personally use GoDaddy. They are a bit more expensive but I like them. :)
We use GoDaddy for all of our sites. I find it easy to manage the domains and haven't ever really been turned off by the price. I've never used Yahoo for domains, but I can say that I am very satisified with GoDaddy.
Yahoo sucks. For the basic domain, the level of control that they give you is practicly zero, and if you want to have a masked redirect, they will show ads with the redirection target page, unless you pay more. I switched to GoDaddy, and there's no comparison. I'm not planning on using any other domain and hosting provider in the near time.
I've used GoDaddy for all of my domains for a while now (even before the big-boobed ad). They were the cheapest at the time (although that's changed now), but they were also one of the easiest to use. I can make changes to my domain information very quickly.
Even though I don't use their other services, I'm fine with the 8 or 9 dollars a year for a domain. Since I haven't had a single problem with them to date, I'd be hardpressed to switch (even if Bob Parsons is a little nutty).