I’m a big DIY type and would love to own/run all the components. I want to be my own registrar, web host, mail host, ISP, but all this can become expensive (in time and money) real fast. Plus, I have a regular job so I can’t really manage all this on the side. Therein lies the dilemma.

After the rfly debacle, I’m now especially paranoid about the cheaper registrars. Makes me wonder if some of the longer operating companies charge more because of reputation. Network Solutions was the original registrar for com, net, org (I think) and afaik, their price has been and still is $35/yr. I’ve also heard they’ve engaged in shady practices like making it difficult to transfer out, essentially holding your domain hostage until you jump through all their convoluted hoops. Meanwhile, you’re still paying their high prices.

I forget if it was NetSol or an affiliate (Verisign?) that redirected all non-registered com, net, org domains to their own pages. Many people were crying foul because they abused their position as the com,net,org authority to capture all the traffic resulting from typo’ed urls. Not only were there political reasons but this broke how DNS was supposed to work. Instead of getting a “host not found” which was useful for network troubleshooting among other things, *all* domains now resolved to *something*.

Stupid shady companies.

(Well, at least for the name hosting. I don’t know if they do registration or not; I don’t think so.)

Actually, I’ve heard a lot of good things about Register4Less at UserFriendly. I have a feeling R4L is UF’s registrar, and I know they run ads there every so often. But I’ve heard good things about them from other members there too, which confirm the ads, so I’m a bit more confident that the ads aren’t lying. However, I’ve never tried them myself.

(My 2 DNS names are in the dyndns-owned domains: is-a-geek.net and homelinux.net. Basically, that means I can use them for free, as long as dyndns exists. But now that I think about it, that may not be a good idea. Hmm.)

I think dyndns does registrations too, at least recently. Last I checked they’re pricy though.

I guess it’s a question of how well (and whether) dyndns will survive. I’m not sure why, but they seem to me like one of those groups that’ll be around for a long time. Could be wrong, though, and that’s what I’m wondering about now.

When I first got these names, I didn’t see anywhere on their site where they’d act as a registrar. The only option was to act as the host (if I already had a domain through a separate registrar), which I believe would have cost me a fairly small one-time fee. They may be a registrar now, though.

In any case, if I moved to my own registrar, I’d have to change the domains I use as well. (The domains I use are below the two mentioned above.) Or I could just run my own DNS server, and point to that in the registration, but that means I need to keep a second view up to date. Plus the server itself. (I already run BIND 9, but it’ll only serve requests from the internal network, and there’s only one view.)

But yeah, I should probably reconsider.

Lunarpages, for example, registers their customers through Tucows (you get the domain free of charge as long as you’re with them). The customer still maintains control of the domain and can take it with them if they choose to leave Lunarpages for a different hosting service. Technically, they could still leave the domain registered through Tucows since the admin for the domain name is separate from the hosting plan.

But anyway, it looks like their DNS-hosting service (for domains outside the ones they own) is $25/year, and their registrar fee is $15/year. That’s not too terrible IMO (though it is more than some other hosts/registrars). OTOH, what I have now is free.

(For that matter, it’s not like I couldn’t afford it, either. But zero is still less than 40, and I think it’s fairly adequate for what I’m doing with it.)