This is unfortunately not a great way to compare providers. After all, who are the people who will come to this site, and leave reviews? Mostly people who had a seriously negative experience, and are keen to fight back by smearing the provider. Perhaps obviously, larger providers will have more of these.
People with normal experiences -- e.g., "it just works" -- will have no reason to find a review site and leave a review, so even though the larger providers will also have lots more of these, you won't see them.
I'm not saying that GoDaddy etc. are wonderful; I left them a few years ago because I don't like the founder, but I never had a problem with the service; it just worked, and it was inexpensive.
A more valuable way to compare (if a representative survey isn't practical) would be to show a walk-through of the various common actions to take at a registrar -- and rate those for usability, price, etc.. I'd be interested to see how registrars vary not just for initial registration price, but also renewal price; for how difficult it is to transfer a domain to another registrar; etc..
Fair point - and I actually do agree with almost all of those. However, I think some of these are inevitable biases that any sort of reviews will face - I think xkcd puts it very well http://xkcd.com/937/ :D
I started the review section as a counter point to the main page, which is purely about comparing prices. For the points in your last paragraph, I fully intend to blog about them where possible. For the time being, I hope that at least some people would share some of those experiences in the review description!
Comments
This is unfortunately not a great way to compare providers. After all, who are the people who will come to this site, and leave reviews? Mostly people who had a seriously negative experience, and are keen to fight back by smearing the provider. Perhaps obviously, larger providers will have more of these.
People with normal experiences -- e.g., "it just works" -- will have no reason to find a review site and leave a review, so even though the larger providers will also have lots more of these, you won't see them.
I'm not saying that GoDaddy etc. are wonderful; I left them a few years ago because I don't like the founder, but I never had a problem with the service; it just worked, and it was inexpensive.
A more valuable way to compare (if a representative survey isn't practical) would be to show a walk-through of the various common actions to take at a registrar -- and rate those for usability, price, etc.. I'd be interested to see how registrars vary not just for initial registration price, but also renewal price; for how difficult it is to transfer a domain to another registrar; etc..
Fair point - and I actually do agree with almost all of those. However, I think some of these are inevitable biases that any sort of reviews will face - I think xkcd puts it very well http://xkcd.com/937/ :D
I started the review section as a counter point to the main page, which is purely about comparing prices. For the points in your last paragraph, I fully intend to blog about them where possible. For the time being, I hope that at least some people would share some of those experiences in the review description!