Re: Any major difference in domain name providers?

In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Doc <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
>In the process of looking to register a domain name, there seem to be
>countless services and avenues to get one and price differences - I've
>seen 6.96/year to more than triple that. Does it make any difference
>who you get the domain name from? Any difference in the functionality
>of one provider to another? Also how do you check on a particular
>company? You're giving out credit card info sight unseen to someone
>you've never seen or heard of beyond their appearance in a web search.

Word of mouth probably counts for a bit. It does matter who you go
with - there's the question of how competent they really are, how
efficient and competent their customer-facing staff are, and how much
you pay. If you're using their name servers, for instance, for how
many hours a year are they offline/unreachable? If you need to change
any of the WHOIS details, how easy and rapid is the process? Quality
of service and uptime, physical location of servers, etc. matter much
more once you get into hosting, etc. too, and different providers will
offer different hosting stuff. From a business point of view, it's
real important that e-mail to your domain is never delayed, and your
web site is never down.

My main advice would be to avoid Network Solutions, unless you want
poor service at a high price, never mind the allegations about
disreputable business practices. I also avoid people who direct-mail
me advertising, especially when it looks like a bill, because I don't
want to reward such behaviour. I'm currently using
http://www.blackcatnetworks.co.uk/ - they're small, but they're
friendly, competent, flexible, and not too expensive. (Charging in GBP
isn't a problem because I just put it on the credit card and take the
USD conversion.) Then again, I go to the UK enough that they're not
out of range of being sued.

In a nutshell: it does make a difference. Try to talk to existing
customers, if you can, because they're the main ones who know how
shoddy the service is.

-- Mark