Domain Name Registration Review

Introduction to Domain Name Registration

If you want to create your own website with a personalized domain name, you'll need to lease the right to use your chosen name from a domain registration service. In addition to a domain name, you'll also need a web host -- a service that actually posts your website on the Internet. See our companion report on web hosting, which is the more complicated of the two decisions. Be aware that you can almost always get domain registration from your web hosting service, but there are some reasons you might wish to purchase a domain name independently.

If the company is still in business as you read this, reviews say RegisterFly.com should be avoided. In almost every review we found, RegisterFly is criticized as a questionable domain registration service. User reviews amplify the cause for concern. The company is currently embroiled in life-threatening legal battles. One battle is internal, and the other is with ICANN. In February 2007, domain name owners began complaining that they couldn't manage or transfer their domains. Frequent downtime was followed by a shutdown of the RegisterFly website in early March (though it was back up at press time). As of April 2007, ICANN was trying to force RegisterFly to fix its problems, but the situation is as yet unresolved.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a non-profit business, manages the domain-name system (DNS) of Internet addresses under the authority of the U.S. Department of Commerce. A domain name is the core part of a URL (Uniform Resource Locator). For example, our ConsumerSearch home-page URL is "http://www.consumersearch.com," and our domain name is "consumersearch.com." ICANN establishes official top-level domains, such as .com, .org, .net, .ca, etc. Individuals can lease any domain name that isn't currently registered with an ICANN-accredited registrar. However, certain top-level domains, such as .edu, are restricted.

Until 1999, Network Solutions.com was the only domain registration service. Now, there are almost 700 of them. VeriSign, an Internet security company, acquired Network Solutions in 2000. In 2003, VeriSign sold part of the business, including the Network Solutions brand name. The company currently called Network Solutions is the third largest domain registration service behind GoDaddy.com and eNom.com. You do not have to use or go through Network Solutions to lease a domain name. However, VeriSign continues to provide all .com and .net domain registration at the wholesale level.

VeriSign currently sells domain names to resellers for $6.00. ICANN charges a 25¢ fee for each domain name, so the wholesale cost of a .com or .net name is $6.25 per year. You cannot buy a name directly from VeriSign. You can only get domain registration from a reseller (or a business that is one step further removed from the process).

Reviews say that the main considerations for choosing a domain name registrar are price and business ethics since the process and operation of registering a domain name is very uniform from reseller to reseller. That's probably why PC Magazine, Consumer Reports, and other major computer, consumer, business and Internet magazines haven't reviewed domain registration in years, if ever. The coverage we found in mainstream media is primarily devoted to web hosting services that also offer domain names. Thus, the best reviews we found are on specialty websites. We also found and disregarded many third-party marketing sites that claim to review domain name registrars, but don't actually include any testing or evaluation.

PickRegistrar.info and ReviewsOnLine.com have good reviews of domain name registrars. The other good reviews we found are outdated, which makes them potentially very misleading for an industry where companies frequently change prices and policies. User reviews are important for evaluating domain registration companies. NamePros.com is the best source for user reviews, but we checked many others as well. To help identify the best domain-name registrars, we explored newspaper and magazine articles, Internet forums, blogs and other sources with unscreened user feedback. We summarize useful coverage of domain registration in articles in the "Not quite reviews" section below.