I share both your criticism and praise, but would add that GoDaddy allowed me to do bulk contact editing which (along with pricing) was the reason I switched to them c. 3 years ago.
Margins may be low, but the domain registrar market seems ripe for disruption. Are there any interesting upstarts in this space?
The goal was to make a domain name registration and management system I'd like to use. That means no upselling and no charging for standard services like whois privacy, url forwarding, and email forwarding.
I also made it easy to set your domain names to not auto-renew and to transfer away your name.
There is also no magical price change the second year or hidden fees that show up at the end of the purchasing process.
I'm actually a reseller of Key-Systems. If I go out of business you'll still have access to all of your domains and be able to manage them through Key-Systems and RrpProxy.net (http://key-systems.net/). They also run Domain Discount 24 (http://dd24.com/) and are a fairly large registrar.
Thank you for being so clear (and open) about it, makes me want to try it and maybe transfer everything there.
I have a quick repair only. If you see your site with Chrome on Windows 7, there's something about the text that doesn't feel right, it looks too thin to be readable at some sizes. For example, the navigation on the bottom left or (even worse) the text inside the inputs of the login form. It's because of Myriad Pro, not sure if you feel like changing it for some more usual typeface like Arial.
Thanks for the feedback. I'll fire up Parallels and do some tweaking on the font type. I do all my work on a Mac so I typically just test with IE on Windows and test the other browsers on OS X.
Good question. I did not mean to be misleading. I was referring to having an initial yearly fee of, say, $8.99 but hidden in the fine print a renewal fee of $12.99. I can't control the yearly rate increases but I'll always just have one fee regardless of transfer, renewal, or initial registration. Sorry for the confusion.
That's true - there definitely would be some room for disruption in the domain registration market.
The thing with GoDaddy, which is bigger than it's 8 nearest competitors combined, is that they've been successful on the back of mass marketing, and earning more dollars off of every single customer they have.
All those add ons, that we geeks so easily ignore, are just mindlessly added on by a large majority of other customers who really have no idea what they need. So instead of earning $2 or $3 for the domain registration service, like other registrars do, GoDaddy ends up earning $200 or $300 from those customers (which gives them more money to use towards marketing again).
I think a major hosting company with a good reputation might be able to make inroads into the domain registration industry (Amazon or Rackspace perhaps), but I don't think most people would trust their domains with a startup.
Comments
I share both your criticism and praise, but would add that GoDaddy allowed me to do bulk contact editing which (along with pricing) was the reason I switched to them c. 3 years ago.
Margins may be low, but the domain registrar market seems ripe for disruption. Are there any interesting upstarts in this space?
I'm taking a stab at simple registrations and management with Coffee & Domains (https://www.coffeeanddomains.com).
The goal was to make a domain name registration and management system I'd like to use. That means no upselling and no charging for standard services like whois privacy, url forwarding, and email forwarding.
I also made it easy to set your domain names to not auto-renew and to transfer away your name.
There is also no magical price change the second year or hidden fees that show up at the end of the purchasing process.
Sorry for asking this under such a nice idea but what happens to those who have domains with a company that goes out of business?
I'm actually a reseller of Key-Systems. If I go out of business you'll still have access to all of your domains and be able to manage them through Key-Systems and RrpProxy.net (http://key-systems.net/). They also run Domain Discount 24 (http://dd24.com/) and are a fairly large registrar.
Thank you for being so clear (and open) about it, makes me want to try it and maybe transfer everything there.
I have a quick repair only. If you see your site with Chrome on Windows 7, there's something about the text that doesn't feel right, it looks too thin to be readable at some sizes. For example, the navigation on the bottom left or (even worse) the text inside the inputs of the login form. It's because of Myriad Pro, not sure if you feel like changing it for some more usual typeface like Arial.
Thanks for the feedback. I'll fire up Parallels and do some tweaking on the font type. I do all my work on a Mac so I typically just test with IE on Windows and test the other browsers on OS X.
How do you deal with increasing registry fee of 7% annually then?
Good question. I did not mean to be misleading. I was referring to having an initial yearly fee of, say, $8.99 but hidden in the fine print a renewal fee of $12.99. I can't control the yearly rate increases but I'll always just have one fee regardless of transfer, renewal, or initial registration. Sorry for the confusion.
That's true - there definitely would be some room for disruption in the domain registration market.
The thing with GoDaddy, which is bigger than it's 8 nearest competitors combined, is that they've been successful on the back of mass marketing, and earning more dollars off of every single customer they have.
All those add ons, that we geeks so easily ignore, are just mindlessly added on by a large majority of other customers who really have no idea what they need. So instead of earning $2 or $3 for the domain registration service, like other registrars do, GoDaddy ends up earning $200 or $300 from those customers (which gives them more money to use towards marketing again).
I think a major hosting company with a good reputation might be able to make inroads into the domain registration industry (Amazon or Rackspace perhaps), but I don't think most people would trust their domains with a startup.