No-Name Domain Names

In the past many of you have asked for advice on registering a domain name. For several years I have done business with Namesecure and most likely recommended their services. I’m sorry to say that won’t be happening any longer.

Namesecure has been a big player in the domain name registrar business since it was “deregulated” back in 1998. They offered features like unlimited e-mail forwarding, domain name cloaking and an easy-to-use web site to manage your domain names and settings. It all worked and through the years I registered and managed a number of domains for myself and clients.

Ocassionally there were blackouts when the domain fell into limbo but these were rare and only lasted, at most, a couple of hours. But slowly they became more common. And then a couple of hours became a couple of days and things got a little heated. I contacted their support and was assured this was an unusual problem that was unavoidable and would not happen again.

A few months later I was moving a site and needed to change the settings for the domain name servers. I keyed in the new entries, saved them and made another pot of coffee. The site never showed up and I assumed it was taking a while to propogate around the `Net. The next day still brought no joy, so I went back to check my settings. D’ooop… it still showed the old DNS. Did I really forget to save it? I got suspicious and entered the new information again and saved it, logged out then went back to check. Same old IP addresses were listed, the Namesecure system was telling me it had saved my entries but hadn’t actually done a thing. Bottom line: it took over two weeks and countless e-mails to support before this simple operation was accomplished.

Scenarios like this have now been repeated several times over the last several months. It really got crazy when I needed to transfer a domain away from Namesecure. The domain was locked, even though I had made sure it was unlocked then the Admin-C contact suddenly changed so we did not receive the transfer request.

I now recommend Go Daddy for domain name registration because their management tools are top-notch and their support has been very responsive. You can even call a 800 number! They also offer excellent hosting packages.

Here’s my preferred list for web hosting at a glance…

Domain Names: Go Daddy or 1 & 1.com

Ecommerce: Yahoo! Small Business

Server Colocation: TulsaConnect.com

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