What factors should I consider before buying any one of their packages. Frankly I don't have enough money, Help me decide with your wise advice on this please. Thanks
None of those. I go with Gandi.net
Check them out. They are good people and give back. Never anything but great experiences with Gandi.
You'll get a free year of ssl certificate and 50% off hosting. But, to really do it on the cheap, get a BeagleBoard Black and a free micro instance with AWS to route traffic to the BBB, which you just run at home. One time cost of 35$ish plus domain registration costs.
Also worth noting, going with a company like Gandi over GoDaddy has many non-immediate and intangible bennifits. A simple Google search on customer problems and company practices of GoDaddy should provide lots of material. In the long run, you don't want to have to be dealing with headaches surrounding domain registration. At all. That should be fire-and-forget. Pay the extra $5 or $10, you'll save yourself plenty of frustration and extra admin time going with the right registrar.
Given almost every site has some kind of UCG -- forums, comments, reviews -- it's impossible to guarantee compliance with Gandi's service agreement. Hacker News could not be hosted on their service given the content of some of the discussions here.
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> You acknowledge and accept that, in accordance with Our Ethics the use of any of Gandi services associated to Your Gandi Account:
> * it is expressly forbidden for use in any way that engages or participates in practices that are deviant, abusive, illegal, or prejudicial; and
> * must be appropriate to the age and sensibility of each of the persons that any of the Content is destined for, directly or indirectly, published or made available to via the technical solutions used
> ...
> You acknowledge that the following elements are considered as constituting material breaches of Your contractual obligations:
> * if We are made aware of, or discover that You provide, or are engaged in, in any way, directly or indirectly, through Our services:
> * any provocation or encouragement to commit crimes or offenses, and particularly crimes against humanity or encouragement of racial hatred;
> * activity or Content of racist, xenophobic, or negative character;
> * activity or Content of pedophile character, or that is liable to constitute or be associated with, either directly or indirectly to it;
> * child pornography, or the trivialization of such acts or encouragement of violence, suicide, or the use, production, or distribution of illegal substances, or acts of terrorism;
However-
I do use 97Cents.net for early stage projects where there isn't production traffic involved. Gandi simple hosting product works well, too. I haven't had the chance to test it w/ significant traffic tho.
I bought a domain from them a while back with private registration; a few weeks later I found out that private registration was not available for that TLD, and my details were publicly visible, making the domain unusable to me. I emailed Gandi, and they told me there was nothing they could do; they were not willing to refund my money, even though their site said private whois was possible for that TLD.
Gandi support is worse than useless. They have no idea what they're doing, they can only read from a script, and the only way to contact them is by email with a nice long turnaround time. Even the tiny little registrar I've used for over a decade (who I don't otherwise recommend because of other big issues they have) has a phone support option and staff with functioning brains.
And if you were paying through our US processor, I'd love to have the support ticket number to look into it, as we're really working to eliminate such payment issues.
Yes, Namecheap's site is slow. But their support has been great and they're cheap. (also they have really cheap $1/year whois privacy)
Google Domains is nice too, almost everything is $12/year.
Namesilo keeps pricing very low, simple and straightforward ($8.99/yr for .com). I haven't had any problems with them so far.
Stay far away from GoDaddy, they try and lure you in with discounted pricing then jack up the price on certain features later on. They are constantly trying to up sell you something else and they make transferring your domain away unnecessarily complex. At least that was the case when I last used them.
(Very much aware of potential DNS issues of this. Haven't invested time to figure this out yet)
Anyways, you probably should consider actually reading the ToS for the companies you are planning to do business with. I think at least Gandi has fairly vague terms on which they can terminate the service: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3388928
https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/help/abuse
In the end though, every company is going to reserve the option of termination for any reason:
NearlyFreeSpeech.NET reserves the right at any time and for any reason,
including but not limited to your violation of these TACOS, to limit,
suspend, or terminate your use of the Services and to discard any of your Content.I just finished transferring my domains out of google to namecheap.
We are a legitimate, normal business. They unilaterally banned our site and took it down - with no access to transfer it out. Their technical team does not give a response in a timely manner.
Our small startup's site was down for 8 days!! If you would like to avoid our experience - never use Google registrar.
Now, I am reconsidering use of Google Apps or anything else from them for businesses.
Gandi and Hetzner both offer 2FA to secure your domains, this is something I find very important, especially with one of my domains having gained quite a value to make it interesting enough a target for a possible theft, and another being so dear to me after more than a decade of use, that I couldn't do without it any more :)
Not always the cheapest, but they're dependable, they're in the EU and they have a very, very broad selection. The latter is important because I have a fairly eclectic mix of domain names and I'm happy to pay a premium so I don't have to deal with 3 different registrars.
All that said, I'd love to have a registrar that just sent us an annual bill for all of our domains (even if it's in advance) rather than billing us separately for every one. It's an accounting headache with all the expenses. I believe GoDaddy does that, but.. no thanks :)
Been with namecheap for quite a while, had no issues.
I had a renewal time-out in the middle of a card verification last month - and that's really not something you want.
They have a very easy interface to manage your domains and their zones. As a result, if you develop your business and need more domains, you'll save a lot of time.
Plus, they have a good customer service, they offer SSL certificate for 1st year, and free emails addresses.
Otherwise I like EuroDNS [2]. They have decent service and a pretty good web UI overall, compared to some of the other companies.
Usually, they're even on the cheaper side of the spectrum too and for the one support case i've had with them they've been good and fast to reply.
Also support 2FA via Google Authenticator.
Side note: What is it about German company websites and extremely small fonts and "busy designs".
DO NOT use google as a registrar. They suck.
I just finished transferring my domains out of google to namecheap.
We are a legitimate, normal business. They unilaterally banned our site and took it down - with no access to transfer it out. Their technical team does not give a response in a timely manner.
Our small startup's site was down for 8 days!! If you would like to avoid our experience - never use Google registrar.
Now, I am reconsidering use of Google Apps or anything else from them for businesses.
My current strategy is to ping pong my domain names between GoDaddy and NameCheap, using coupon codes as much as possible. I don't particularly care for either company, and I think that both are still too expensive, but I don't have an alternative at the moment that I am aware of.
I've been using NFS for years on low traffic sites and have not had any issues. For the unfamiliar, it's pay as you go for bandwidth and storage, with discounts as you start using more of each.
The interface is ancient, and they pass CC costs on to you, but for the price, I've yet to find something better.
Like I said, it has worked for me. I didn't say they were perfect.
Please show me what domain registrar do you use that you would recommend, and then let's see if there aren't any horror stories whatsoever.
Since nobody answered this part:
First, I don't recommend having your web hosting and your domain registration with the same company. It's convenient, and most people will never have a problem with it. But, when someone does have a problem with it, having both hosting and domain registration with the same company can make things harder. If your account is suspended for some reason, you lose access to everything; if your hosting is with a different company and you lose access to the domain name, you can get another domain name up and running with minimal effort and point it to your hosting company. If you have a problem with the hosting, you can keep your domain and set up new hosting. Either way, you have half as much trouble as you'd have if you were using a package deal.
Second, take a very close look at their terms of service. Anybody can have a bad experience with an otherwise good company; terms of service tells you what kind of company you're likely to be dealing with. People have pointed out elsewhere in the thread significant issues with Gandi's terms of service, for example. Another one is NearlyFreeSpeech.net: if you ever have a problem with your NearlyFreeSpeech.net service and you try to get a freelancer like me to help you out with it, that freelancer will find it nearly impossible to work with NFS. You really don't want to hitch your wagon to a business that will make it unnecessarily difficult to work with their support when something has gone wrong.
Third, speaking of support, take a very very close look at what kind of support they offer. Gandi doesn't offer phone support; if you have an urgent problem, you have to rely on email along with all of its crappy other issues and their really slow turnaround time. Look for someone that offers phone support, and before ordering service, go ahead and give the phone support a call and see how difficult it is to reach a live person, what the wait times are like, and how easy it is to understand the tech support person. When you do reach someone, just tell them you waned to see what their support was like before ordering service, they'll understand. (It'll be an easy trouble ticket for them to close.)
Do NOT go with the cheapest possible domain registrar. It's just not worth it. The most expensive registrars are like 15 bucks a year for most common TLDs. Going with the cheapest possible one might get you down around $3 a year, so you're saving a dollar a month to buy yourself a headache in the future. There are a couple of domain registrars to avoid: Network Solutions (because they make transfers extraordinarily difficult and because their web interface is confusing as hell) and Gandi (nonexistent/terrible support and stupid ToS).
Be careful about going with cheap hosting services. Most of them will put you on a shared plan that will guarantee that your site will go down if it ever gets a little bit of traffic. Most of them have really stupid server configurations that can make managing multiple sites really confusing. I've seen some horrifying security policies and responses from several companies (HostGator immediately comes to mind). NearlyFreeSpeech.net is the cheapest possible web hosting, but they don't offer mail hosting and if you ever need support there's a good chance you're out of luck. They specifically do NOT want to have newbies for customers.
GoDaddy has been a big bad problem often in the past, so what I'm about to say makes me a little sick to my stomach, but: they're really not so bad anymore. I've had some excellent experiences with their support over the last year, and they're one of the few companies that offers phone support for everything. Their support people -- most of them, not all of them -- know how to use a commandline and can poke around in server configurations and can talk to you at a level you'll understand. I don't hate having to deal with GoDaddy anymore. That said, do NOT use their mail hosting, they have significant problems with it and nobody there seems to know how to fix it. And nobody's wrong for telling you to stay away from GoDaddy, they've had a well-deserved awful reputation for a long time.
Lastly: if you really don't have much money, and you're just getting started, and you don't need anything very fancy (or controversial, I don't make enough money to put up with the headache of supporting a hate site), contact me at my email address in my profile. I will register a domain for you for free (and make sure you have full access and control of it) and also host it for free, mail service included. I admin my own servers. I don't offer the very fastest support response in the world, but you'll have a phone number you can call. I've done this for a couple of other people on HN and no complaints so far (as far as I know).
The cheapest by far. They don't screw you over on the renewal like most of the registrars.