Best and Worst Domain Registrars
The best domain registrars:
- Omnis - affordable and reliable. $7.95 for .com domain names. Cheap web hosting too. Nice, intuitive control panel for domain management. They have good customer service and they won’t blow you off.
- Go Daddy - an ok price at $9.99 for .com domains, but they aggressively market other crap to you like a used car salesman. As long as you ignore all their spammy ads, you’ll be fine. Their control panel is ok.
The worst domain registrars:
- iPower - They boast cheap registration - $6.85 for .com domains, along with cheap hosting, but they have the worst customer service in the history of American business. How so? First, they say they have a ‘live chat’ on their site, powered by liveperson. It is NOT live chat. Their network is continually down and no one is ever around to chat. If they do not give you a ‘network unavailable’ error, it will show you this:
We appreciate your patience. All operators are currently assisting other customers. Please continue to hold and we’ll be with you as quickly as possible.
They will retain your credit card information and will charge it even if you cancel your account. Each domain will be billed separately as multiple charges on your card, making it so you cannot charge back the card, without closing your entire credit card account.
Their control panel interface is horrendous, where they purposefully made it next to impossible to cancel your account. In my experience, I chose to ‘not renew’ my domains and cancelled the account, yet, they still charged my card. If you email support, you will get a different person each time, and will only use generic responses that doesn’t address the question. No one takes ownership of the problem to help you, so you will never get anywhere. Avoid iPower at all costs. The fact that they’re $1-$2 cheaper than others means nothing after you experience the nighmare I experienced with them.
- Dreamhost - $9.95 registration for .com domains. This company also is resistant to ‘not auto-renewing’ closing your account. They may ignore emails to ‘not renew’ a domain and go ahead and charge your card for another year. It’s fraudulent either way you look at it.