I've never found a more honest company. For example, they recently discovered a billing error that amounted to $56 over 5 years .. so they refunded everyone double, donated what they couldn't refund to charity, and apologized profusely. (http://blog.nearlyfreespeech.net/2011/04/07/a-small-billing-...)

My one criticism of NFS is that there's no way to save a credit card on file. Certainly makes those "inspiration struck, better go register the domain" purchases much more of a have-to-pull-out-the-wallet ordeal... but maybe making random domains more annoying to buy is actually a good thing.

That is because they use a prepaid model instead of charging you after the registration. Just keep a couple bucks in your account and you can register domains even when you don't have a credit card handy.

As an aside, have any of those inspiration struck domains ever paid off or been developed further? I ask because I've registered about 50 of them over the last 3 and a half years and after a good nights sleep the fire has usually died down and they languish in my account until expiry...

I'm not entirely sure of how it works these days, but when I used to host sites there they required you to host your sites on NFS if you wanted to qualify for the cheap domain registrations.

Domain registrations are always $8.99/year at NFSN. Whois privacy costs $0.01/day, but you get a 20% rebate if you prepay it. DNS costs $0.01/day for each domain not registered with them and $0.01/(3 days) for every domain registered with them. If you also host your website (A record for the main website points to NFSN) with them they reduce it to $0.01/(3 days) and $0.01/(9 days) respectively.

To sum it up: If you register your domain with NFSN, use their DNS servers but not their hosting offers you will pay $10.21/year, which is $0.82/year more than the $9.40 you will pay if you also use their hosting offers.*

* Beware of the rounding errors in my floating point math.