What registrar has best support and is most reliable? (When price is irrelevant)

[devax]

So, after my Moniker nightmare I need to find a new registrar. I have small portfolio of important domains, and i'm looking for a place with absolutely top notch support and that is totally reliable. Price or advanced website features are not at all important.

What would be your recommendation for the above criteria?

 

[Kostas]

I use 1and1, godaddy, name.com, domain.com, namecheap, domainmonster and 101domain
Godaddy is ok, name.com is very good but a little slow sometimes in their support, stay away from domain.com, can't say anything about namecheap as there was no need to contact their support, domainmonster has the fastest support from all but I have read for many problems about them, 1and1 is not that reliable, 101domain is reliable but the support could be better. Overall, from the above, I would recommend you name.com.

 

[Tribulatio]

A registrar that I have found to be quite reliable (and who happens to be very affordable, in addition) is NameSilo.com. I have been a customer from the very start, but until recently I just a handful of domain names with them. However, I find their support to be very convincing, never any problem with them, clear and personal answers to support requests. Although the design of their website is not the one I enjoy most, I have started moving more domain names to them due to the quality and reliability of their support.
But there will certainly be other valuable suggestions on this forum. There ARE reliable registrars, fortunately, and it is a good idea to compare and inquire.
The it depends also which TLDs: there are some registrars I chose specifically due to their support and pricing for some specific TLDs. But I assumed your question was about .COM domains?

 

[domainjosh]

I have been using Epik for a while now and they are very reliable and have great customer service. They customer interface is very user-friendly and easy to manage multiple domains. I have never had any problems with Epik.com

 

[discobull]

So, after my Moniker nightmare I need to find a new registrar. I have small portfolio of important domains, and i'm looking for a place with absolutely top notch support and that is totally reliable. Price or advanced website features are not at all important.

What would be your recommendation for the above criteria?

If we were talking about a large portfolio, I would go with GD because you'd be eligible for premier services which offers the best support in the business ( imo ). For a small portfolio such as yours, I would go with name.com. They're a solid company, offer dual factor authentication, and are also part of the afternic premium network which means that even though your domains are at name.com, they can be listed in GoDaddy's registration path as premium domains ( an important consideration for me, might not be for you ).

 

[Kate]

Epik... fail.

 

[Name Trader]

I happen to agree with Tribulatio. With all my few dealings with NameSilo.com, they have always served me extremely well. Cheapish prices and a lot of free services, like privacy. But I personally use Dynadot.com, and I have been more than happy with them. A bit of a learning curve with their control panel, imho, but it can do as much as GoDaddy's, which I would never recommend to any domainer, largely because they are not domainer friendly, and support is a pain, now they have dropped email support.

 

[tonyk2000]

After 10+ years domaining, we found one important criteria in addition to price or support or management-tools. It is registrar's _business ethics_. Even with cheap pricing and 24/7 support, but with questionable business ethics (such as questionable actions in past or present), the customers will have problems earlier or later. So we'd recommend to check at lest the following - using forums etc - before transfering or registering "critical" (or any other) domains:

- did the registrar put domains on hold based on some random e-mail complaints

- is the registrar directly or indirectly associated with spamming operations, such as whois spamming, in particular "Seeing that you have a similar domain name, we are selling <...>" especially for pending-delete domains they do not own

- is the registrar a "preferred home" for customers registering questionable domains such as pharmacy shops and/or trademarks

Checking icann compliance notices history may also be helpful:
icann.org/en/resources/compliance/notices

While of course we can name registars that are "guilty" (in sense of above-mentioned aspects) AND are more-or-less known/popular, it is not a purpose of this thread.

So we'd better name registrars that showed higher ethical standards in different aspects:

- Fabulous.com - as they pay registrants a %% of $$$ earned for sales of their expired domains. Many other registrars will sell expired domains on nj/sn without paying anything to former owners

- EasyDNS.com - as they refused to take an "innocent" domain name down after receiving such a demand from London police station (NOT from a court @ appropriate jurisdiction). Many other registrars would have elected to comply with such a request

 

[Name Trader]

Apart from your last 2 paragraphs tony, I thought you were describing GoDaddy