This week GoDaddy is doing a special on private registrations, and instead of the usual $9.99, hiding your WHOIS data will set you back just $3.99. What’s more, if you register 5 or more domains you will get free private registration on them all. Sounds great, right? Well sort of. I mentioned this a while back, but if you didn’t know, NameCheap offer free private registration, and their domains are cheaper than GoDaddy. I am not going to bash GoDaddy, again, but what is with big domain companies and their unfriendly approach toward domainers?
GoDaddy is pretty clever in that their auction process is an awesome place to catch domains, and once you do so you are locked in unless you transfer, which cost me around $13 last time I did that (2011). You can wait for expiry and do so or free, but who wants to get involved in that risky business. If they were a bit smarter, surely they’d implement bulk ordering for domainers, free transfer into GoDaddy, and at the very minimum free private registration for regular customers.
To be fair, you can save on GoDaddy if you trawl the web for a promo code, but that’s the last thing you want to do when you’re looking to register a domain fast. There was an offer floating around some time ago that offered a 10yr registration for $70, which is great for website owners with a long term strategy, but not for domainers looking to sell out within a year.
GoDaddy is the commercial end of domaining, and you pay a premium for the name, albeit a name that has been decimated on blogs and forums over the years for poor customer service, an antiquated control panel and heavy pricing. Fact remains, like it or not, most of us have domains with the Daddy purely due to transactional circumstance and a stubbornness to pay transfer fees to another registrar.
Whoever you use for registration, in times of such austerity, it’s worth looking around at some of the smaller outfits, and one I came across this week was Omnis, where dot coms can be had for under $9. They offer bulk discounts for domainers, too. For example, 200+ dot coms will pull the price down to $7.95. I am sure cheaper can be found elsewhere, it’s just a case of taking time out to research. Imagine if you could shave two or three thousand dollars off your portfolio costs per year; a big win.
The benefit of a more commercial company is reliability, and knowing they won’t suddenly fold – Omnis by the way, have been around since 1999. But how reliable is GoDaddy, with its reputation for being hacked through the WordPress CMS four times in 2010/2011. Okay, that has nothing to do with domain registration, but the point is; are you really getting a better service paying more? Look at Hostgator, the company most people leave GoDaddy for. It’s highly affordable and cited as one of the most reliable hosting companies on the market. But anyway, this is about domains.
If you do have domains with GoDaddy, perhaps ones you’ve developed, and want to register them privately, take advantage of that discount today. And, if you want to register more than 5 domains, search for a GoDaddy promo code, and then take advantage of free private registration.
