Move To A Better Domain Registrar

(NOTE: This article is intended for those who are with a “bad” domain registrar. You would have gotten a link to this article from us)

Last week, we had to make a change to a Client’s domain settings, and it took over 24 hours for those changes to go live. In the meantime, DOWN TIME. Website AND Email.

Ugh. I hate working with bad domain registrars.

Down time is one of the things that commonly happens with bad domain registrars. Unfortunately, your domain is registered at one of these bad domain registrars. So, we’re being proactive and strongly recommending you move your domain to a better domain registrar.

There’s geeky/tech stuff but this is important.
You can skip to the end to see the ACTION ITEM.

We’ve been working on an important “clean-up” project. We’re moving the settings for our Clients’ domains from our webserver back to their domain registrar. This is to make your website/email/domain setup more robust and flexible.

There are a bunch of settings your domain has, things like: where to send email and where the website server is.

Something that’s become very clear as we make these changes is that not all domain registrars are created equal! In fact, there’s some outright BAD ones.

Sorry to say, your domain registrar is one of the bad ones!

Just to be clear, your domain is different than your website. Your domain name is registered at a Domain Registrar (like GoDaddy). This is where you buy and manage the settings (DNS) of your domain. Your web host is where the files of your website live. Your email host is where your emails are hosted. You have domain settings that tell the Internet where to send people looking for your website and where to send emails.

What does having a “bad” domain registrar mean from a practical standpoint?

  • trickier to make updates (and easier to cause a problem)
  • slower website load time
  • SLOW publishing of DNS changes (can result in downtime for your website)
  • little, poor or no help
  • missing out on free extras like email forwarding and URL forwarding
  • poor Security (risk of having your domain stolen!)

That last point is really important…

In order for us to make DNS changes to your domain, you had to give us the “keys to the kingdom”, FULL access to your domain. We’ve seen unscrupulous web companies literally STEAL their Client’s domains, transferring them our of their Client’s account and into their own.

That’s scary!

It’s one thing to lose a website; they can be recreated. But if you lose your domain, you lose your website and your email. You have to start over with a whole new domain!

This is why you want a domain registrar that has the capability to let you give your web company LIMITED access to your domains. You want your web company to have access to change the DNS records but NOT to transfer your domain away from you.

ACTION ITEM

I strongly encourage you to move your domain to a better domain registrar.

After working with about a dozen domain registrars, here are 3 that I like (in my order of preference):

  1. GoDaddy.com. This is who we’ve used in the past, very user friendly interface for DNS management, and 24/7 phone support. They’re the world’s largest Domain Registrar.
  2. NameSilo.com. This is who we use. It’s not as user friendly as GoDaddy but we like it for more geeky reasons.
  3. Namecheap.com. We haven’t used them ourselves but have a few Clients that use them and it’s been a good experience.

All 3 of these domain registrars are:

  • easy to work with,
  • provide 24/7 support,
  • offer competitive pricing
  • and MOST importantly allow you to provide LIMITED access to your web company.

With working with all 3 of these domain registrars, domain changes happened almost instantly (we’re talking less than 10 seconds!) and we’ve never once had a website experience down time with them because of a domain change.

The process to move your domain and get this “mess” cleaned-up is quick and easy. All 3 services will help walk you through the move. If you want us to do it, we’ll do it for a flat rate of $50/domain.

If you have any questions at all about this, reach out to Jen at 705-792-7155 or email support@gravitystack.ca.