Changing domains? Check out these 3 cheap registrars

If you haven’t looked into the domain registrar market in the past year, you may have missed some big changes.

Competition for domain registration dollars is so fierce that well-established companies have thrown in lots of freebies — including free Google Apps or templates to help create a starter Web site — to lure customers. Of the top ten fastest growing registrars (according to domain market research site RegistrarStats), three — GoDaddy, 1&1 Internet and Name.com — now charge around ten dollars per year for domain registration, and throw in a grab-bag of bonus features to sweeten the pot.

These three services register names in all the usual domain spaces, from standard .coms, .nets. and .orgs to the content-descriptive domains .info, .biz and .name, and modified country codes such as .tv and .me. They also provide hosting packages and offer an upgrade path if you need more robust hosting options.

Supplying the basics

The three registrars we looked at are accredited by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which certifies that their systems are compliant and that they are held accountable.

Each provides at least one e-mail address at your domain that can be tapped via Web mail or a POP or IMAP e-mail client like Outlook or Thunderbird. They also all provide the option of setting up e-mail aliases — forwarding addresses that redirect mail from your domain to an existing e-mail box elsewhere.

You can also set up a basic Web presence at your domain. You could put together a few template-based pages to be hosted at the registrar’s servers, or set up domain forwarding to redirect Web browsers to a page you’ve already set up (your blog or social networking site, for example).

If you’re already established at another registrar — say, Network Solutions or Register.com — don’t assume you have to stay with them. Registrars must release domains for transfer if the registrant requests it and the transfer process is established and secure (see “Domain transfer 101” for step-by-step details).

The registrars also provide technical support via FAQ, e-mail, and even telephone. And for those who believe in safety in numbers, they each administer the registration records of millions of domains.

The base services from the three registrars we looked at all cost about the same. There’s a spread of only a couple of dollars per year in registration fees between 1&1 Internet and Name.com (both with base prices of $8.99) and the marginally more expensive GoDaddy ($10.79) — and that difference is often eroded by special-offer pricing.

What really makes the registrar selection decision is the match between the features they offer and the features you want. And there’s some variety there. We decided to look at what approximately ten bucks can buy you from a domain registrar these days. And it’s surprising.

1&1 Internet

Like all the ICANN-accredited domain registrars in this roundup, 1&1 Internet offers multiple levels of service. The basic package includes registering a domain and providing basic tools for establishing e-mail addresses and a Web presence at that domain for $8.99/year — the same price as Name.com and almost $2 less than GoDaddy.

Like all registrars, 1&1 Internet also offers upgrade paths through multiple levels of hosting, depending on server space, bandwidth and features like e-commerce that pile on large monthly fees.

On the face of it, the registrar provides a pretty decent deal. While both 1&1 Internet and GoDaddy offer only one mailbox at each domain before they start charging extra, 1&1 Internet’s base package provides twice as much e-mail capacity (2GB) as and lets you set up a twice as many e-mail aliases — 200 versus 100.

1&1 Internet also offers anonymous domain registration as a freebie to help keep your contact information private. (Domain ownership is a matter of public record; some registrars will substitute their contact information so you can’t get stalked or spammed.) All three registrars in this review provide anonymous registration, but GoDaddy charges $8.99 a year for the service.

The Web mailbox you get from 1&1 Internet is fairly rudimentary. Its plain-vanilla interface provides e-mail basics such as formatting, attachments, custom folders and spam filtering (using preconfigured settings and your own blacklists and whitelists). This is nice, but it’s nothing you can’t get from GoDaddy or Name.com.

However, 1&1 Internet does offer a few unusual and handy features, such as the ability to forward e-mails at a single address in your domain to up to three other addresses.

On the downside, 1&1 Internet encourages you to upgrade to a fee-based service called MailExchange to get virus protection and calendaring, which Name.com and GoDaddy give for free.

1&1 Internet’s Starter WebsiteBuilder is a handy little bundle. Many people using starter domain packages prefer to forward visitors to a pre-existing blog or social networking site. But for those who don’t, Starter WebsiteBuilder lets you build a basic five-page starter site quite easily.

It provides a more intuitive and streamlined process for creating starter sites than Name.com’s convoluted approach, and its templates and toolbars provide more graphic options than the starter site builders at either GoDaddy or Name.com. And for those who wish to exchange files using FTP, 1&1 Internet lets you create special FTP accounts that let visitors sign in before downloading.

While 1&1 Internet’s basic domain registration package does have not the most exhaustive list of features (especially when compared to Name.com), it’s quick and easy to set up, and is well suited to people who need a working e-mail address and a basic one-to-five page HTML-based Web site at their new domain. Its prices are more reasonable than GoDaddy’s and its basic mail package is more generous.

GoDaddy

GoDaddy has made a big splash with its brash TV ads and sports sponsorships, and the strategy has paid off: The company has the largest market share in the world. Of course, market share is not a good reason for going with a registrar. Although GoDaddy does provide a solid package deal for well below standard rates, it doesn’t necessarily outshine the other two registrars in this review.

While the standard discount price for a .com domain hovers around $15 per year, GoDaddy charges $10.79, while 1&1 Internet and Name.com charge $8.99. Price is something of a moving target, however. GoDaddy often runs sub-$10 weekly specials and uses loss-leader pricing on domain spaces such as .info and .me to lure impulse purchases — and then it tacks on a 20-cent “ICANN fee” that most other registrars include in their list prices.

When dealing with budget domain registrars, the simplest approach is to send your visitors to an existing blog or Web site. GoDaddy provides this basic service, but from its domain management pages you can turn on one of several other options: You could create a starter five-page Web site from templates. You could set up a parking page or “for sale” page.

Or you could turn on basic hosting, which provides 10GB of space for building a site, and allows monthly traffic of up to 300GB. That’s more than enough for a well-trafficked, graphics-rich site with largish file downloads — and it affords you more creative license with your own HTML software than GoDaddy’s five-page template-driven “WebSite Tonight” pages.

GoDaddy’s Webmail offerings are the smallest in their class. True, you can create up to a hundred e-mail aliases — forwarding addresses that redirect mail to your domain to another address — and even set up a catch-all address that sends any mail to your domain to a single mailbox. But you get only one proper mailbox at your domain, and it has a capacity of one paltry gigabyte.

If you do most of your mail on the Web, GoDaddy’s freebie offerings will wear thin pretty fast. It’s not that the technology or features are lacking: There’s a strong spam filter that you can configure with blacklist and whitelist addresses. The online application saves e-mail addresses as you reply to incoming mail, and provides a pick list of matches when you enter the first few letters in the To: box of a new mail.

You can download a little notify application for PC and Mac platforms that alerts you when you get new mail in up to five e-mail boxes (if you purchase four extra ones, that is). And in several years of using GoDaddy’s Web mail, I’ve never seen an outage or bounced mail due to technical problems.

But there’s simply a shortage of storage space, so unless you do most of your e-mailing from a POP or IMAP offline reader, you have to frequently purge messages with attachments from the Sent or Inbox folders to avoid seeing unsubtle suggestions about upgrading your space for a fee.

A few other things about GoDaddy’s offerings don’t stand up well to 1&1 Internet and Name.com. For one thing, GoDaddy charges extra for a handy feature the other two give away for nothing: anonymous registration. Every domain registered has a Whois record in the public domain which includes the name and contact information of the registrant. Most big registrars will offer an anonymous option, where they put in their contact information so you don’t get stalked or spammed — but GoDaddy charges $8.99 a year for the service.

In short, GoDaddy’s offerings are reasonable and reasonably priced, but despite being the biggest domain registrar in the world, GoDaddy doesn’t offer Wal-Mart-style pricing and service. If you want robust e-mail options and extras at rock-bottom pricing, 1&1 Internet and Name.com have a few more tricks up their sleeves.

Name.com

Name.com differs from the pack. Its basic registration package is priced like a budget registrar’s — you get .com domains for $8.99 without hidden extra costs — but it includes Web and e-mail offerings that compare favorably to a basic corporate intranet package.

When you register a domain at Name.com, you get access to a bundle of Google Apps that up to 50 people can use. Each user gets an e-mail box with the familiar Gmail Web interface, which your domain administrator can customize with your company or domain brand. It looks like company mail (right down to thename@yourdomain.com), acts like Gmail, and comes with a huge 6GB capacity. There’s spam filtering, and each mail address can be configured to forward messages to another box or download to POP software.

There’s more to Name.com’s Google Apps offerings than e-mail. Your domain administrator can set up shared or public calendars for individuals and groups, and there’s a Google Docs space where groups can share and collaborate on documents. Each of these can be set up at a subdomain, so you’d find your calendar at calendar.yourdomain.com and your documents at docs.yourdomain.com. In fact, by directly editing your domain record, you can set up whatever subdomains you like.

To establish a public Web site, you use a Google App called Sites that uses a template-based user interface. It can seem a little confining to anyone who’s coded their own HTML, but Sites is on a par with the template-based approaches of GoDaddy and 1&1 Internet. And because of Name.com’s focus on groups, the Google Sites tool enables any number of authorized people to set up personal Web spaces at your domain.

In essence, then, Name.com provides you with a virtual intranet for a laughably small initial investment. That’s not to say it’s easy for an inexperienced administrator to set up (but then again, what intranet is?).

For one thing, the Google Apps administration is entirely separate from your domain administration pages. Before you can set up any Google Apps at your domain, you must log on to Name.com’s DNS management pages, and map your domain to specific google.com servers. To get your Google Sites Web page on your domain, you must add a CNAME record to your domain profile and map it to Google’s site (ghs.google.com).

That said, both Google Apps pages and Name.com’s help pages explain the steps clearly and thoroughly.

Name.com’s copious offerings require a fair bit of administration. On the other hand, because the whole user experience is based on Google applications, any effort put into learning feels like a transferable skill instead of a chore you’ll never be able to apply elsewhere.

Conclusions

There’s no concept of “one size fits all” in the domain registration world, so each of these registrars probably delivers an ideal basic registration package for somebody.

If you’re creating a Web page for a personal project or one-administrator business, you can’t beat the simplicity of GoDaddy and 1&1 Internet’s approach. 1&1 Internet has a slight edge in price and e-mail capacity.

If you’re a little more ambitious and need multiple e-mail boxes and a venue for team scheduling and collaborating on projects, Name.com provides all that for a rock-bottom price.

Domain transfer 101

Most people tend to stick with the domain registrar they first used because they don’t understand the transfer process. Some people actually fear that if they stumble, they may lose the domain. That’s not likely to happen, but that’s not to say that the process is entirely straightforward. For a worry-free domain transfer, follow these steps.

Pre-transfer checklist

Before starting a domain transfer to a new registrar, log in at your old registrar’s Web site and locate the domain management control panel. If you’ve forgotten where you registered the domain, go to BetterWhois.com and enter the domain name there. This will kick up the WHOIS record — which shows the domain registrar of record and the domain registrant (that’s you).

At your old registrar, check all these items:

• Check the dates. Make sure the domain you’re about to transfer isn’t about to expire. The transfer process may take two weeks to complete even if everything goes smoothly, and may go up to four weeks if you hit any stumbling blocks. Give yourself plenty of time. Also, your domain must have been at the current registrar for at least 60 days before you can transfer it.
• Make sure the contact information is correct. Be especially sure that the e-mail address for the domain administrator is current — you’ll be handling a fair amount of e-mail during the transfer process. If you used anonymous registration at your old registrar, you’ll have an unfamiliar-looking e-mail address in the Admin Contact field. Contact the old registrar’s technical support to make sure this won’t cause a problem with the transfer.
• Turn off domain locking. Most registrars put a lock on your domain record to prevent unauthorized transfers. Of course, these locks also prevent authorized transfers, so turn this off before you get started.
• Locate the AUTH code. If you’re dealing with a .com, .net, .info, .org, .biz, .name or .us domain, you’ll need a transfer authorization or AUTH code from your old registrar. It saves time to get this together before you start a transfer. Different registrars handle AUTH codes in different ways. For example, 1&1 Internet lists the AUTH code in the domain admin page; GoDaddy makes you click a link and sends the code via e-mail. Other registrars may make you open a support case or call their billing department to get the code.

The transfer process

Your new registrar handles all the heavy lifting during the transfer process.

• Re-register your domain name. Click on the Transfer A Domain link at your new registrar. Enter the domain name(s), and follow the registration and payment steps the registrar puts before you.
• Pay attention to your e-mails. In the next few days, you should get e-mail messages from your new and old registrars. Pay careful attention to them. Some may be plain receipts; some may be notifications, but at least one of them will be a call to action. It will contain a link you must click to acknowledge that you are the administrator of record for an existing domain, and you authorize its transfer to another registrar. On the acknowledgment Web site, you will need to enter the domain’s AUTH code.
• Wait for a week or two. If you followed the e-mail instructions to the letter, your new registrar will send a confirmation of successful transfer within two weeks.

Post-transfer details

• Close out your old account. If you ordered any hosting or optional extras at your old registrar, make sure you cancel them before the next billing cycle.
• Update your name servers. The domain record at your new registrar should be identical to the record at your old registrar — including the name servers. If your domain was hosted or forwarded at your old registrar, you’ll need to update those records to point to servers at your new registrar.

Matt Lake has covered the domain registration industry ever since it became a multi-vendor market in 1999, and since then has test-driven dozens of domain registrars.