When clients who are buying a new domain ask me where to go I always recommend either GoDaddy or Network Solutions. If they ask why I tell them that both offer all the services they’ll need and they offer 24/7 tech support.
(At flyte we use GoDaddy because of it’s pricing and despite it’s terrible user interface. Their booth babes don’t figure in one way or the other.)
Just recently this came up with another client. She already had a registrar when she approached us, so we didn’t change anything but her hosting. As it turned out, she had her domain registered for three years; on record it will expire about a year from last week.
Regardless, she started getting alerts from her no-name registrar that her domain was expiring this year. She decided to take no chances and visited the site to renew. However, when she tried to renew the site responded that there was nothing to renew. Still, she got those emails.
When the date in question passed–unfortunately on a weekend–her site went down. The no-name registrar was located in another country and didn’t answer its phones. Even during the week her calls went to voicemail.
Ultimately we got in touch with the registrar and got the Web site back up and running, and are moving her to a more well-known, well-established and always-open domain registrar. I can’t calculate the time, energy and money wasted on saving a few bucks over the course of the year, not to mention the stress.
We all want to save money, but when it comes to registrars, it’s no time to be penny wise and pound foolish.
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