I've registered over 300 domain names with Network Solutions, Bulk Register, Opensrs, NameBoy, enic and GoDaddy. My opinion:
Network Solutions - Yep, over priced, foolishly bureaucratic and an arrogant company to do business with. They abused their government contract, hoarding information, and justifying high fees while overstating operating costs at the ICANN hearings (while they rapidly expanded into other countries). If your name expires, it's not re-entered into the domain pool, instead, it's auctioned. When? I've seen names expired for 9 months but you can't purchase them! NameBoy - they were reasonably priced but their interface with a name suggestion engine was a big hit and very creative at the time. eNIc - high priced, you can get .cc addresses elsewhere for lower cost. Customer service is good. Bulkregister appeared and were very popular, grew quickly and showed the world that domain names could be offered for a low and bulk-discounted fee. Nice to deal with, but a little slow in responding. Opensrs took it a step further with even lower fees and became the #1 registrar for new domain names .com, .net and .org. Again, great folks to deal with. This lasted over a year. GoDaddy came on board even lower and are the #1 registrar now. Godaddy has a good quick interface but they aren't the best to deal with. Expressly stated they give NO refunds. You mess up you can loose your fees. Tip: If you don't transfer in time and GoDaddy states "There is no refund!". Go back to your existing registrar and renew your domain name. THEN, go back to GoDaddy and ask them to resubmit those same domain names for transfer. OK, so you paid for an extra year, at least you can recover your money. Another drawback, GoDaddy charges $19.95 to change ownership. StarGate.com - Thanks for this name. Register over 2 domain names and you get it for $8.00 per domain, with free email, URL forwarding, dns control panel! Quite a bargain. Both GoDaddy and Stargate are probably leveraging their domain sales as a loss leader to cross sell services. Keep an eye open. James Lesnick Please visit http://www.ipswitch.com/support/mailing-lists.html to be removed from this list. An Archive of this list is available at: http://www.mail-archive.com/imail_forum%40list.ipswitch.com/
