I use gandi.net, for both personal and business domains. They're awesome.

Specifically: they have policies that strongly support the domain owner, they make a point of saying the domain owner owns the domain (not the registrar), they give back to many different Open Source projects, their management software works quite well, and they provide free email service for your domain so you don't have to run a mail server if you don't want to.

Their hosting works quite well too. Not the best for disk performance, but they have good unmetered bandwidth, tons of flexibility, and good management software.

Seconding Gandi. I've test driven them with a new account and I'm very pleased with the level of control and no-nonsense control panel. Where GoDaddy's is very messy and tries all kinds of sneaky tricks to make you shop for more, Gandi keeps it clean and straightforward.

Single best feature? Total access to domain zone files. I also like that as an individual you can hide your contact information from being displayed in the whois records.

gandi.net also provides a free ssl cert for registered domains. They're just awesome.

Only for a year, then you have to pay to renew it. Still decent, though. But if you want a free cert, try startcom instead.

Here's the list that i post every time someone asks this. There are plenty of other ones, but these are the "tried and true" top list.

  * Gandi.net

  * Namecheap

  * Name.com (Some very sleazy practices, see child)

  * Moniker

Name.com is pretty evil too. They opt you in to a "service" that displays ads from your domain (where they keep the revenue, of course), and say that you are responsible for ensuring that the content is legal

See http://nathanhammond.com/namedotcom-another-unscrupulous-reg...

I just bought a domain from Name.com yesterday (in an effort to escape from GoDaddy) and I'm surprised at how nasty their interface is. These big registrars really try to make their users suffer.

Thanks, I've updated the post.

A vote for Moniker from me as well, having settled for them 3 years ago, after a few years with 1and1 and some with Godaddy and having tried various other registrars.

I use their control panel once every couple of months and although it doesn't have the "pretty" element to it, it's quite an easy and intuitive tool to work with and I even dare say it, is the most functional domain management tool I've seen.

At a glance you can see which domain is locked, private, auto-renewed, etc and changing any of this is just a matter of selecting a couple of domains from the list and applying the action you want in a batch.

For example, you want to transfer 5 domains away: 1- go to the domains manager 2- from the list, check each domain you wish to transfer away 3- click on the Transfer Domains Out action 4- simply follow the flow and provide the extra info where required.

You could be done in less than a minute.

One more vote from me to Moniker — their control panel might be a little bit more awkward and buggy than it should be, but the services are stable and non-disturbing.

And in general, it is usual a good idea to have separate service providers for domain name registering and for hosting.

I'm almost extremely happy with Dreamhost as a registrar. (I got a year of hosting from them for $10 during one of their quite-common sales, and then let the hosting go but got to keep them as a registrar.)

Their interface is a little clunky but reasonably nice, and they make some stuff, like setting up Google Apps, super-easy.

Unfortunately, their password recovery scheme is to email me my password in plaintext, and I'm really not comfortable having my main domain that controls my email and online presence protected by bad security, so I'm moving off of them very soon, at least for danieljackoway.com

I've been happy with dnsimple.com, not the cheapest but has a clean UI, intelligent features, and intelligent support the YC crowd here would appreciate.

I'll second my vote for DNSimple. We were using GoDaddy before and we had an issue where they were returning faulty DNS records from certain hosts (which was such a pain to diagnose). After trying to deal with support at GoDaddy we were done.

We switched everything over to DNSimple and I'm happy paying them $3/month so I never have to look at another GoDaddy config/upsell screen again. They also have a status page (powered by Pingdom) http://status.dnsimple.com.

Yeah, totally agreed. I met one of the principles of DNSimple at MagicRuby earlier this year. Definitely worth giving these guys $3 a month for the amount of time they save me. The time their configuration templates for Heroku and Tumblr have saved me much more in time than I'll ever pay in subscription fees. They also make it super easy to get SSL certificates.

In light of everything that has been in the press recently about GoDaddy I did some research on good, yet reasonably priced, services - here's what I came up with:

* Registration: Gandi.net (at time of posting $15.00/yr for .com with 1yr SSL cert + some other junk I won't use) * VPS / DNS: Zerigo.com (for a 512MB RAM slice it's $20/month with significantly more storage and transfer than, say, Linode. Performance states no oversubscription (we'll see) - their DNS service looks good for the money comparatively, you get 20domains @ 20/yr with, what looks to be a nice API) * DNS runner up: Dyn.com (more expensive than what I'd like to pay with limits that seem like they could be a problem until you scale to the more expensive stuff. That being said, they look to be very reliable.) * SSL: RapidSSL.com (who knows anymore with CA's based on the DigiNotar fiasco and Comodogate, but the price is right)

There have been tons of "domain registration" threads on HN. Consider this one, just one day old: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2964201.

My personal domain, registered through GoDaddy is up for renewal soon. Ashamed to say that I was in the dark about them until now. I'd also love to know about legitimate alternatives.

Just moved all of my domains from GoDaddy over to Namecheap. Interface is slick and very easy to use. First year for privatized whois info is free too!

I use domaindiscount24.de for all my domains. Despite the name that might imply a somewhat cheap quality they work really well and I never had any problem's so far.

I've only used GoDaddy once when someone transferred a domain to be and wanted to do this over GoDaddy's internal transfer feature. The first thing I did was transferring the domain to domaindiscount24.

I've been using domain.com and they've been doing fine for me. No parked domains or anything underhanded. Although they do shove "private domain registration" in my face every time I log in, the rest of the site is pretty quiet and gets out of my way.

I use Dreamhost. $9.95 is reasonable, and it's great for placeholder, static or otherwise low-traffic, low-importance sites (which of course are the majority of domain registrations).

Same. They also offer free anonymity, and I find their interface for both registering domains and hosting easy to navigate. I share their hosting with a handful of friends, mostly for testing and extremely low-traffic, personal use stuff.