If you manage your own domain, I’m sure you’ve had the joy of dealing with an ICANN-accredited registrar unless you’re perfectly content with getting reamed by a service provider who hides that small amount of administrative complexity from you for quite an inflated fee.
Normally domain name registration and renewal isn’t a particularly hard process unless the registrar chooses to make it so in the name of “security” but the prices can vary wildly so it does pay to shop around for the best deal.
Most people don’t tend to bother once they’ve gotten in with a registrar and the average registrar is counting on it not being worth the hassle to find a better alternative. In fairness, I’ve “gone native” with the last two registrars I had staying with them for *YEARS* until persistent DNS technical problems with my domains forced my hand to move from one registrar and then billing problems with false fraud alerts preventing me from renewing with the account I wanted to encouraged me to start looking round with the current registrar.
Keep in mind that best deal may not necessarily be the cheapest…a cheap registration won’t do you much good if your registrar’s systems are down most of the time and uncertain of operation the next and technical support is glacial to nonexistent.
After all, that domain name plus a correct nameserver entry in the Domain Name System (DNS) is what keeps you from typing in an often changing IP address to access your favourite websites.
In that regard, my current registrar has been decent enough and I really haven’t had any complaints with their service other than their payment processor sucks but in an economy that’s barreling toward hell as fast as it can, it makes prudent business sense to question what you’re paying and seeing if there’s a better deal to be had elsewhere.
If you’re really lucky, you’ll find a registrar that is both cheap and has great technical support for the rare times things go a bit sideways and I think I’ve found just that in Porkbun who has a pretty twisted sense of humour in their branding that pretty much exudes from every page of their site.
I found them amongst five or so candidates when I was looking for a registrar with great reviews and fair pricing.
What I really like about them is that you’re getting the domain registration at their actual cost from ICANN without the usual bombardment of upselling a lot of crap I really do not need. I don’t need a SSL certificate or EMAIL hosting (two of the more popular upsells) because the web host I use already provides it for the domain.
One can make the argument that separating EMAIL hosting from web hosting is a best practice but in the 27 years I’ve had my own domains, I have yet to experience any significant loss of amenity from the extremely rare hosting outages that more often than not were a result of the network connection to the host going down as opposed to the hosting provider’s server failing. So you do you on that one… 🙂
I’m also not a fan of the deceptive practice of huge discounting on the first year with the big screw job coming upon renewal where the rates get jacked up through the roof with the registrar counting on the vast majority of people who can’t be bothered to switch again.
So when two of my domains came up for renewal, I unlocked those domains on the current registrar and captured the EPP code needed to authenticate a transfer request.
I then signed into Porkbun and initiated the domain name transfer from the current domain registrar on their absurdly simple page:
After paying for the transfer/renewals, Porkbun fired off a transfer request to the current registrar who sent me an EMAIL letting me know they’d received it and that if I didn’t reply in five days, the transfer would occur.
And it did…right on the dot.
No pain, no fuss, no muss…it just happened and no one was any the wiser that those two domains now had a new registrar who was only charging me $11.08 per .COM domain for the year as opposed to the $17.29 I was paying previously.
In a few months, all of my domains will be moved over to Porkbun and it’s hard to imagine that I’m going to need to move them again based on the experience so far.
It really is an oddly satisfying experience. 🙂