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On Thu, 27 Nov 2008, James Fidell wrote:
Mark Hajdukiewicz wrote:Has anyone used www.livetodot.com ? What do you think of them? They are offering .co.uk at £5.16 plus VAT - no hosting.Whenever I see stuff like this I find myself asking if I can see any way I could run a business registering domains at a 16p margin and make it sustainable given all the other costs of being in business. The question of whether to use them or not usually gets answered very shortly afterwards.
It does make you wonder...Bit of a disclaimer here - As part of my business, I run a small, local, DNS registation, email/web/server hosting facility - I don't want this to look like an advert though - most of my clients are SMEs who just want a one-stop-shop. From the little time I've been on this list, I suspect most people here have enough clue to do this themselves!
But DNS registration is something that annoys me - the options are vast and knowing who to choose is somewhat of a lottery, or so it might seem. From my point of view, there are basically 2 choices - use one of the bulk buy companies, get it cheap, but with maybe minimal support, or advert supported hosting/email, etc. or use a smaller company, pay a reasonable price and get support. (and no interference)
At the wholesale level, you can get domain names cheap - if you buy enough of them and become a registry, although the fees involved are somewhat steep initially. I think it's less than £2.50 a year now for a .co.uk if you're a registrar. To make a profit out of that, you need to sell lots - 1000's, and then some. So if you have enough automation, taking £5.16 for a domain per year can eventually make you some money. Charge per pop box (more for imap + webmail) and again for disk space and bandwidth and you might just start to get somewhere... After you've got 1000's of customers, but then theres's the support issue )-: I buy domains for between £10.50 and £15 a year from the registrar I use. (totalregistrations), but then I run the DNS servers and can provider the "behind the scenes" stuff for my clients in a more bespoke manner than some registrars can.
Half the problems I encounter are that the punter want's cheap! And in the current climate who can blame them... But I always try to persuade people to pay a little more for a better service, if possible.
One thing to consier is how much it might cost you to move your domain out of the registrar you registered it with... Read the small print!
I'll throw a few companies at you here (use google to find them :)123-reg have been going for a while, gone through a few takeovers, etc. but still seem OK. Not without their problems, but generally OK. They allows you a good level of control over the domains and DNS data now.
Hostroute/Nameroute - the owner used to post regularly on some forums, but I haven't heard from him for a while, but the company still appears to be going strong.
Gradwell - considered by some to be the "Rolls Royce" when it comes to independant internet "stuff".
However, the best possible way is by personal recommendation - who does you'r friends use? Are they happy with them? Do they get support if they need it? And so on...
And do be prepared to pay just a little bit more for a slightly higher level of service. Bit like ADSL really, but I'll rant on about that another day ;-)
I'll be popping down to Paignton tonight if anyone wants to whinge :) I'm really curious to see just what people are getting up to re. Linux and open source in the south west!
Gordon
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