Back when I registered this domain in 2010, I used GoDaddy, mainly on the strength of them having a special deal where I could register a domain for very cheap. I’d been wanting for a while to get my own domain and web host so I could play around a bit, and saw a deal advertised on slickdeals.net for $1 domains, so that was my excuse to finally do it.
I had heard the GoDaddy name quite a bit, thanks to their marketing, and they seemed reliable. And, from a technical standpoint, I never did have any problems with my domain name resolving, or getting hijacked, or anything like that. So for that much, they were fine.
There were several thngs I didn’t care for about GoDaddy: their sexist TV advertising, the fact that at one time, prior to the public uproar over it, they had backed SOPA and PIPA, and then they had a high profile security breach a few months ago, which didn’t seem to affect me one way or another, but made me lose confidence in them.
They also had some other issues, for example, they would email me an awful lot, to the point where it was really spamming me. And the experience of actually registering my domain with them involved a great deal of very aggressive “upsell” and e-checkout spam that made the entire process annoying, about as annoying as trying to order anything from Dell, and it was unclear what many of the additional products they sold even were, let alone what they did, and whether they were something I needed for my purposes, or a good idea, and so on.
So my registration finally came up for renewal, and I opted to transfer DNS to 1and1. I didn’t do a whole lot of comparison shopping, just asked around and people who’s opinions I regarded highly said they were OK. A few people said DNSimple was good, too.
Transferring this domain to the new registrar was not entirely easy, but I managed to go through all the hoops and set things up. The name finally transferred over today, and for some reason at first 1and1 seemed at first to be using my hosts’ name servers, which was good, but then a little bit later, this updated and they were using their own nameservers, which caused my site to go down for a few hours. I had to log in to my account and reset them back, but it still took about two hours to resume resolving properly :-( I’m not sure whether this was my own mistake, or theirs, but it’s resolved now.
Hopefully this will be the only problem that I have.