Review of 4 domain registrars

21 Aug 2016

Lately, I’ve been rather obsessed with getting domain names, to the detriment of my bank account and Bitcoin wallet balance. I started with eliangtan.com, then elt.sg, taneliang.com, eliang.science and finally eliang.work.

Of course, I wanted to get the best value for money. Before I started, all I knew was that I didn’t want to register my domains with GoDaddy. I found many smaller registrars and couldn’t find any independent reviews or feedback for them. Because of this, I thought I’d post a short review of all the registrars I’ve used so far.

Key:

• 😱: WTF?!
• 👎: Bad
• 👌: OK meh
• 👍: Good
• 👏: OMG that’s amazing

Namecheap

One of the most popular registrars out there – can’t go wrong with them.

• 👍 Price – Cheap .com, .net, .org TLDs. Note that the prices on their site don’t include the $0.18 ICANN fee
• 👍 Reputation – One of the biggest and most reputable registrars
• 👎 Account security – Only SMS 2FA, an obsolete technology
• 👍 Payment – Card, PayPal, Dwolla or Bitcoin (through BitPay)
• 👍 DNS
  • 👌 Records – A, A+ (dynamic DNS), AAAA, CNAME, MX, NS, SRV and TXT
  • 👌 TTL – between 1 min and 60 min
  • 👏 Redirection – Both URL and email
  • 👍 Wildcard records – Supported
• 👌 Whois privacy – 1 year of whois privacy (WhoisGuard) included free

OnlyDomains

To be honest, the only reason I used OnlyDomains was that they sold .sg domains cheaply and I wanted a cool 3-letter domain. Their site is pretty but is lacking in features, most notably the now ubiquitous 2FA. Still, their prices are competitive and they even issued me a Domain Registration Certificate.

• 👍 Price – Cheap .sg domains at SGD49.99
• 👌 Reputation – Nothing particularly noteworthy here
• 😱 Account security – No 2FA of any kind
• 👎 Payment – Card or PayPal; Bitcoin not supported
• 👎 DNS
  • 👌 Records – A, MX, CNAME, NAPTR, TXT, AAAA, SPF and SRV
  • 👎 TTL – Not customizable; the default is 86,400s (1 day)
  • 👎 Redirection – Only URL redirection supported, and you can’t have both URL redirection and other DNS records at the same time
  • 👍 Wildcard records – Supported
• Whois privacy – It wasn’t supported on my .sg domain so I have no opinion on this one

NearlyFreeSpeech.NET

NFS is actually the first registrar I’ve used. I love their no-nonsense approach and their pay-for-what-you-need model. When you buy a domain with them, you don’t even get DNS – you have the option to pay them a little to host your DNS with them or you can host it somewhere else. There’s no URL redirection – you’ll simply set up a static site (for almost no cost) with a .htaccess file. Don’t worry about getting lost either, they have a very extensive FAQ page. The interface looks dated but it feels reliable and powerful, and has a very raw, DIY feel. I love it.

• 👍 Price – Cheap .com, .net, .org domains
• 👌 Reputation – They aren’t ICANN-accredited, but domain registrations are done through Public Domain Registry, which is ICANN-accredited. Besides, they’ve been around since 2002 so I think they’re reliable enough
• 👏 Account security – 2FA with Google Authenticator/Authy
• 👏 Payment – Card, PayPal, Dwolla, mail-in check, money order or Bitcoin (through BitPay)
• 😱 DNS not included(!!!) – If you wish to host your DNS with NFS, they charge $0.01 every 3 days if the domain is registered with them, and $0.01 every 9 days if the main www subdomain is hosted with them too
  • 👌 Records – A, AAAA, CNAME, MX, NS, SRV, TXT, PTR records
  • 👏 TTL – Customizable without any restrictions that I could find
  • 👎 Redirection – No included parking pages or URL redirection – but you can host a parking page or .htaccess file on a site with them for nearly no cost
  • 👎 Wildcard records – Unsupported
• 👌 Whois privacy – Whois privacy (RespectMyPrivacy) available at $3.51 per year

Porkbun

I’m not a fan of pork buns, but I’m in love with Porkbun.com and their service. I bought eliang.science for $14.80 for 10 years. Besides being mindblowingly cheap, this domain will only expire when I’m 30 years old. What?! That’ll take an eternity. If you’re new to domains, you might want to buy a .science (or another $1.48 domain) just to experiment. I’ve heard that their customer support is fantastic too.

• 👏 Price – Cheap .com, .net, .org TLDs – in fact their renewal price is the cheapest I could find. Cheapest .science, .bid, .accountant, and some other gTLDs at $1.48 per year for up to 10 years
• 👌 Reputation – Porkbun is a small company with <10,000 domains registered with them, so they don’t have much of a reputation. But they’re ICANN accredited and I’ve found good things said about them
• 👏 Account security – 2FA with Google Authenticator/Authy
• 👏 Payment – Card, PayPal or Bitcoin (native!)
• 👍 DNS
  • 👌 Records – A, MX, CNAME, TXT, NS, AAAA, and SRV records
  • 👏 TTL – Customizable without any restrictions that I could find
  • 👎 Redirection – URL only
  • 👍 Wildcard records – Supported
• 👏 Whois privacy – Whois privacy included

All registrars in this list were good, but my favorite is Porkbun for their price and features. I’ve also been looking at registering domains with Alpnames.com, Webnames.ca (which has super cheap $1.99 .work domains but the included DNS is limited to domain parking and URL redirection), gandi.net, etc, but I haven’t gotten around to buying anything there yet. If y’all know of any better domain registrars, tweet me at @taneliang or email me at eliang@eliangtan.com. I hope this review will give you an impression of what some of these relatively unknown registrars are like.