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Apr. 11th, 2011
Registrar switch
Apr. 11th, 2011 07:16 pmI've been using GoDaddy as my domain registrar for years, but over that time Bob Parsons (the owner) has seemingly been getting progressively more idiotic, and he finally pushed too many of my buttons.
I looked around a bit and decided to give namecheap.com a try. I issued the switch request on Friday night partially because that's when I decided, but also somewhat to make it a worst-case scenario.
I'd never done a switch like this before, it took more back-and-forth than I thought it would, but it is now complete with no humans being involved at either registrar. I had to visit both sites a few times and authorize this or that, but NameCheap sent me emails along the way indicating what I had to do.
The only hitch came when GoDaddy released it, about 1PM today. It took until about 4:30 or so for NameCheap to get the authorization, then I had to go set things up there. So the site and email forwards were down for about 4 hours.
I'm VERY pleased with the web interface at NameCheap. The web interface at GoDaddy is a labyrinthine mess, seemingly built at random by a dozen developers who never talked to each other. It always took me more time than it should have to get in and find the right place to do even the simplest of things, even if I'd done them just the day before. I found myself creating a bookmark folder to find stuff there. By contrast, with NO experience on the NameCheap site, I found everything I needed within about 3 clicks and was never confused about where I was or how I got there.
All the DNS entries and email forwarding appears to be working correctly. Changes take place quickly. It's a lot less hassle to set up, and there appears to be a TON more functionality in NameCheap; I have access to everything, if I wanted to set up TXT records for DKIM or something, it's all there. It's likely that stuff was there in GoDaddy too but it wasn't obvious and it was hard enough just getting bare functionality to work.
As a bonus, as far as I can tell they GAVE me the time that I cut off the GoDaddy contract, which was over a year, so after paying for one year there I'm good to September of 2013.
I have another domain that I'll be switching this week. I have a 3rd that I'll leave alone for now, it's paid through 2012 and I am thinking about just letting it expire, it's barely used.
I looked around a bit and decided to give namecheap.com a try. I issued the switch request on Friday night partially because that's when I decided, but also somewhat to make it a worst-case scenario.
I'd never done a switch like this before, it took more back-and-forth than I thought it would, but it is now complete with no humans being involved at either registrar. I had to visit both sites a few times and authorize this or that, but NameCheap sent me emails along the way indicating what I had to do.
The only hitch came when GoDaddy released it, about 1PM today. It took until about 4:30 or so for NameCheap to get the authorization, then I had to go set things up there. So the site and email forwards were down for about 4 hours.
I'm VERY pleased with the web interface at NameCheap. The web interface at GoDaddy is a labyrinthine mess, seemingly built at random by a dozen developers who never talked to each other. It always took me more time than it should have to get in and find the right place to do even the simplest of things, even if I'd done them just the day before. I found myself creating a bookmark folder to find stuff there. By contrast, with NO experience on the NameCheap site, I found everything I needed within about 3 clicks and was never confused about where I was or how I got there.
All the DNS entries and email forwarding appears to be working correctly. Changes take place quickly. It's a lot less hassle to set up, and there appears to be a TON more functionality in NameCheap; I have access to everything, if I wanted to set up TXT records for DKIM or something, it's all there. It's likely that stuff was there in GoDaddy too but it wasn't obvious and it was hard enough just getting bare functionality to work.
As a bonus, as far as I can tell they GAVE me the time that I cut off the GoDaddy contract, which was over a year, so after paying for one year there I'm good to September of 2013.
I have another domain that I'll be switching this week. I have a 3rd that I'll leave alone for now, it's paid through 2012 and I am thinking about just letting it expire, it's barely used.