alt Hacker NewsLike I have said previously¹ about choosing a registrar: If you have regular backups, and if some downtime is not really a problem, it might be fine to use web site hosting, e-mail (and in extreme cases even DNS hosting), from some fly-by-night el cheapo provider. But your domain name registrar? Pick them carefully, don’t skimp, and make sure they have good support. Because when things go pear-shaped, you really want to be able to actually talk to someone to change your web server or e-mail DNS records (or even DNS servers) to somewhere else.
Big registrars can’t afford any support costs since they prefer to squeeze the price down as far as possible, and therefore they prefer to simply lose or outright drop any customer in case of any and all problems. Conversely, small registrars may charge more, but have better (i.e. actually existing, and sometimes even dedicated and personal) support for when things go wrong, and have a vested interest in keeping you as a customer.
A small registrar might also be so small as to know you personally, which will help monumentally against any social engineering attacks.
Full disclosure: I work at such a registrar, but you’re probably not in our target market.
Replies
Picking a small registrar to optimize for reliability seems iffy. Perhaps today there's a passionate and knowledge owner personally picking up the phone (or empowering a small custom service department). But will that person still be doing that in 3 years time, or will they have moved on?
I was pleasantly surprised at how good the support was for my budget personal vps with a big provider, but I agree with your argument; if I was in charge of a business-critical domain then I would be arguing for a budget to cover something more boutique.
>But your domain name registrar? Pick them carefully, don’t skimp,
Especially because domain names are not expensive anyways, a dot com (gold standard of domains) has a cost to registrars of like 11 USD right now, so registrars can charge anywhere between 15 USD and 25 USD, maybe you can find one selling at cost at 11USD or at a loss with promotions even!
But we are talking about saving 10$/year? That's less than 1$/mo. Trying to save 1$/mo is strictly in the terrain of underfunding your business, if you can't allocate enough funds so that Domain costs become a non-issue (and a provider like namecheap stops being attractive) then you will fail in a thousand ways, it's not just about domains at this point.
I have used gandi.net for many years. They provided good support and offered things like free email forwarding. Then they were bought and the new owners just double or more prices and made anything extra including email a ridiculously expensive extra.