Protoscopic

Some registrars cost significantly more than others. Why? We’re not sure. Does it make a difference in service? Not really, in our experience. Historically we’ve used Register.com, but in this experiment cost was more of an issue. We were obviously concerned by what we might lose in working with a less expensive registrar; so far–pretty much nothing.

Danica’s all about a professional web presence.

Our experiences with the “low-cost” registrars were largely uneventful. We will probably have more insight once we get into a billing dispute or have some kind of outage. We used NameCheap for the majority of our registrations as we had reservations about GoDaddy, if for no other reason that their advertising does not seem to be targeted at businesses. (The whole “Danica Patrick’s Beaver” campaign just didn’t project the right image.)

From what we can tell, as long as you’re not swayed by efforts to up-sell and don’t mind a considerate, but targeted, customer service call or two, the differences are minimal … as far as we know. Our reviews are below and are clearly focused on “low-cost” registrars, as the more expensive options make it harder for a micro-business to turn a profit.

GODADDY.COM

• Con: Several (often underhanded) efforts to up-sell during registration
• Pro/Con: “Customer service”/sales call to our home after registration. While this phone call might actually be comforting to someone new to the process, it still represents a bit of a downside to using GoDaddy for our purposes. We really don’t have the time to screen sales calls from GoDaddy for every registered name (note: it remains to be seen if we’ll get calls for every name registered or just for the first).
• Possible Con: “Front-runner” in the field may have less incentive to provide good customer service

NAMECHEAP.COM

• Pro: More streamlined registration process
• Con: “Timeouts” cut off purchases too many times
• Pro: First year of “domain privacy” for free (i.e. namecheap won’t reveal your personal information if queried as to who owns a requested domain name)
• Con: DNS interface could be better. If you actually have some understanding of how DNS works, their attempts to make it more user-friendly are counter-productive. If you don’t have any understanding of how DNS works, you’re going to be confused anyway, so we’re not sure they’ve achieved much.

REGISTER.COM

• Pro: User interface is good. Support has been fine. Really no complaints but the price.
• Con: By far the priciest of these options. Also they add a default $9 fee for domain privacy.

By now even the most net-unaware people are familiar with “domain names.” It is a vital step in creating your online business, as many ideas are made or broken on the domain name they select. We have no fantastic insight in picking domain names; perhaps the readers can suggest some resources. We basically spend our time with a notepad and thesaurus, and just brainstorm. It’s both exciting and frustrating, as you may know.

We often want to just “get started” on our ideas before we’ve found a suitable name for them. In these cases we usually use a service like DYNDNS’s dynamic website service. Basically they have registered a bunch of TLDs (Top Level Domains) and will allow you to create a specific name under those domains for free. So for example, DYNDNS has dynalias.com, which we usually use. So until we come up with a name for our site, we can register prototype.dynalias.com or some such and be able to work on the site. While the service is free, DYNDNS is aggressive about clearing out the names pretty quickly unless you ‘touch’ them by updating.

In the process of trying to find a domain name you may have already interacted with a domain registrar, a service like GoDaddy or Register.com, which provides the service of registering your domain name for you (and usually much more). (If nothing else, you’ve used their web interface to check if your desired domain name was available [it probably wasn't].) So once you’ve found your desired domain name, you now have to choose which domain registrar you want to use.

Historically we have only done low-volume domain registrations. Just one or two here or there, so we haven’t worried horribly about price. However in this experiment, particularly in the early stages, those yearly fees can have a considerable impact on our profitability. Consequently we turned our attention to the lower cost alternatives, and our first question is, of course: Why are some cheaper than others?

The general consensus is that there is no particular reason why Register.com costs dramatically more than GoDaddy. At their base they are providing the same service, which, for a .com domain, costs them roughly $7. So GoDaddy at approximately $10 is not making a huge markup on this service, while Register.com makes quite a profit. In both cases, however, their main goal is to upsell other services (like hosting) for which they have a higher profit margin.

In our experiment one of our goals is to avoid unnecessary charges. We have used several of the registrars and our results have been largely as expected. We have historically used Register.com and have always been satisfied with their results, however for this project we needed a lower priced alternative. So we tried both GoDaddy and NameCheap for our domains.

You can read our preliminary reviews of the services, however neither had any particularly surprising deficits. Once we had registered the domains we needed to set up the DNS entries for them, which we have documented as well. At that point we tested them out and were the proud owners of several new domains: empty lots waiting for us to start developing.

We are approaching this endeavor as something of an experiment or game. As such, we must have a list of rules of what we’re doing and how we’re doing it. Essentially our goal is to apply our knowledge in other areas to the field of “Net Business” and test its feasibility and methodology. To do this, we want to conduct an experiment to see if we can grow from relative neophytes with limited capital, to success. In doing this we will apply several standard paradigms:

Start Small
Our goal is to test the efficacy of various business models, tactics and tools. To do so, we’ll start with what we consider micro-businesses. By this we mean businesses that can be started from next to nothing. There seem to be many opportunities for this out there, and we’d like to see if through sound application of principles we can yield a return that is worth our time.

Grow
As we become successful (note the optimism) in each level we will try larger scale businesses. These may be related to the original ideas or may even be the original ideas expanded. Our goal is to progress up the ladder, however. So even if we don’t have the capital to advance these original phases, we reserve the right to move on to new ones once we’ve proven out initial levels.

Create Value
We will not pursue any business models that involve tricking customers. We want sustainable, passive income, and we don’t feel that taking advantage of people is a good way to achieve that. As such, we will be trying to create valuable Internet properties based on providing goods or services that people actually want.

Operate Ethically and Honor Intent
Similarly we will honor the intent of our partners, suppliers and clients. For example, we would not make a website dedicated to inflating a website’s PageRank, as that is contrary to Google’s intent. We would instead recommend relationships that improve PageRank by providing valuable content, a sure way to improve PageRank.

Try New Things
While we may not be interested in every single kind of Internet based business, we will go out of our way to try out different ideas—seldom sought as well as high-trafficked areas—in order to have a broader spectrum of experiences to share.

Affiliates
On both the blog and our businesses we will make use of affiliate programs and other advertising. However we will not advertise or endorse businesses we don’t think add value.

More rules will certainly follow as our experience grows, but these seem a good starting place.