My suspicion is that most folks either use, or try to use, a single domain registrar. It certainly makes managing domains easier.
So, for this week's poll I ask how many domain registrars you currently use. Besides voting in the poll, please share the registrars you use, why you use them, and what you think of them in a post.
Here is my take on the answer to that question for Casino City.
Right now we use five domain registrars. Our new domain registrar of choice is Netim. We started using them in February of this year, and already more than 75% of the domains we own are registered through them. We first looked at using Netim because they support registering a large number of different country top level domains at very reasonable prices, and we wanted to expand the number of country tld domains we own. We owned a fair number of such domains before, but we now own domains based over 100 different country tlds. Another plus is that they have an API that made it easy for us to automate monitoring the status of the domains we own. And we've generally found their support to be good, particularly around some of the complexities of international domain registrations.
Our previous domain registrar of choice was Moniker, and we still have 20% of our domains registered with them, although I expect to move virtually all of those domains to Netim over the next few months as we get closer to their renewal dates. We have a half dozen domains with Marcaria. They support some country domains that are not easily registered elsewhere, and their support can be outstanding dealing with the complex back-and-forth when a registrar imposes special scrutiny on proposed domain names that incorporate what they consider to be the sensitive term "casino." I've had to work with them to provide trademark registrations, affidavits on how a domain will be used and other legal complexities. And we have one domain registered with EuroDNS because none of the other registrars we work with support the tld. But my absolute favorite registration story regards a Caribbean island nation. There we submitted a scanned paper domain registration request form to the local University department whose staff processes such requests and grants domain registrations that last indefinitely at no cost.
Michael