[conspire] (forw) I might need to change registrars?

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Alex Kleider (alexkleider at protonmail.com):

> I've also been using easydns.com for a very long time and have no complaints.

Alex, Rev Anon, and Sy:  I appreciate your thoughts, the hitch being
that Michael P. is the only commenter I am _certain_ knows what I'm
looking for.

I notice, Alex & Rev Anon -- and this is not a deal-breaker, just a
slight warning sign -- that your recommendation is not just a
registrar-full-stop.  Yours offers "domains, DNS, Web hosting, e-mail
hosting, SSL certs, and easyBackup Cloud Storage.  And probably other
things.

I look for a _registrar_.  A registrar does registration of domains.

When I look at a shop like "easydns.com", I'm reminded of Deirdre's
anecdote about a retail building advertising something like "Bob's Dog
Obedience School and Taxidermy Shop".  (We'll get Fido into shape, one
way or the other.)

When I moved my domains to Ideegeo Group Ltd. d/b/a IWantMyName of 
Wellington, NZ in 2016, they were a _registrar_, one that was good at
it.  No dog obedience.  No taxidermy.

I am nonetheless happy to hear of your good experience, as I am with Sy
(and UserFriendly) having good experience with register4less.com --
which I note _also_ has its share of dog obedience and taxidermy
(Web hosting, e-mail, DNS hosting, SSL certs, "active account
monitoring").

Since IWantMyName getting gobbled up by CentralNic Group PLC of London, 
I notice it's picked up the same dog training and taxidermy.  That
was the _first_ leading indicator that they might have ceased to quite 
grasp how to be competent at being a registrar.

To be fair, and to reiterate, as I said, it's not a deal-breaker.
Gandi.net, for example, in addition to being a registrar, does DNS 
hosting, e-mail, SSL certs, some specialised Web hosting, and clown^W
cloud hosting.  I don't hold the taxidermy and dog training against
them, as there are _also_ signs they understand that being a registrar
is their core business, not just something to be half-assed about
because customers won't know the difference.

Anyway, Michael P.'s litany of things Gandi does _right_ squarely
addresses the sorts of qualities that distinguish, in his and my view, a
competent registrar from one that sucks.  Which please see:
http://linuxmafia.com/pipermail/conspire/2023-February/012261.html

A few call-outs:

   very good access delegation capabilities, so various aspects of
   domain management can be separated out among various persons (e.g. 
   DNS vs. whois vs. billing, etc.).

Refreshing.

   they're mostly not under the claws of US law (at least regarding
   controlling domains), but do fall under EU and GDPR)

All other things being equal, I prefer some distance from US government
and corporate thuggery.  Being outside the US (e.g., doing business
with our esteemed Canadian neighbours) is good.  Being outside the 
Five Eyes intelligence-sharing consortium (US, Canada, NZ, Australia,
UK) is a further nice-to-have.

Gandi SAS, for what it's worth, is a French firm with main office 
in Paris (not Germany, Michael).

   I ran across a slight bug in their interface - notably setting up
   account in US, and dealing with states.  I reported the issue to
   them.  They fixed it lickety split and were great on communication
   and follow-through to check and ensure that all was well and I was no
   longer seeing the earlier issue I'd reported - pretty impressive
   response for a non-paying (or at least not-yet-paying) customer.

Yes, and it's little things like this that give you greater confidence 
-- just as being told something provably _wrong_ about public WHOIS 
by a registrar's Support staff, on a subject central to what registrar
technical staff ought to know cold (what I've experienced with the 
new, London-owned IWantMyName) erodes confidence.

   Their no bullsh*t slogan/motto really does very much apply.  No
   gimmicks, tricks, clean interfaces, they don't shove bunches of
   advertisements and stuff like that in your face.  [...]  And no
   promotional/sales/marketing/etc. emails [...]

In contrast, Michael mentioned in passing how utterly dreadful
NetworkSolutions.com / Web.com is.  _Wow_, don't I know it.  
My mother-in-law Cheryl Morris somehow ended up with her
cherylmorris.com domain at a sister Web.com mark:  "Register.com", and,
in disentagling her from them, and severing her business relationship, I
came to regard them with convulsive loathing.  Their customer WebUI is
not only very badly designed but is first and foremost designed to be
_manipulative.

Cheryl, who is 84 and losing a lot of her capacity to manage such
things, had been manipulated through misleading dialogues and highly
manipulative defaults into buying several other domains (which she had
no use for), SSL certs (which ditto, since her one actual domain
has a Let's Encrypt cert Deirdre manages), a whole thundering tribe
of bullshit, worthless "services" on top of all the domains, and 
_everything_ was set to automatically charge to her debit card, with
everything set to autorenew into perpetuity.

It took me about a week or two to locate and turn off all of the
unwanted, useless products and services, but, even then, the customer
WebUI denys the customer the ability to do two important things:

1.  You may not remove the (last) active payment method.  Even after I'd
transferred her one real domain over to IWantMyName, allowed the
bullshit domains to expire, and switched off all the products and
services, such that the account showed Register.com providing nothing to
Cheryl, they insisted on having the blood tap into her checking account. 

This rather enraged me, because at the time, I had thought I'd removed
all products and services, not knowing about the useless and unwanted
SSL certs, listed in a different and deceptively described part of the
site, until I saw them _again_ dip into her debit card for $18/month 
for two SSL certs.  I now deleted the bullshit certs, too -- and sought
to make sure they had no permission to charge anything to her checking 
account by removing the debit card account number, only to be told
"Hey, sorry, we want the ability to grab money, some more, so no."

2.  Closing the customer account.  This is one of those fleecing outfits
that requires you to telephone them during business hours so they can
funnel you through Customer Retention specialists and waste your time 
offering you special discounts if you'll change your mind.

With rising irritation, I went through the required gauntlet with
Register.com for Cheryl.  I was curt but polite with the staff,
stressing that I demanded (1) they must delete all record of the
debit card right away, and (2) Ms. Morris is categorically and without
exception severing her business relationship with them as of today.
Therefore, they will make no further contact of any kind, no calls, no
e-mails, no marketing, etc., other than an acknowledgement of closure.

The agents -- who sometimes got confused and referred to Cheryl as a
Network Solutions customer, by the way -- never quite delivered on
demand #2, in the sense that there were a number of additional marketing
e-mails.  But I believe they finally went away.

Anyway, yes, Web.com Group under any name -- Network Solutions,
Register.com, ShoppingCart.com, NetObjects, Website Pros, Solid Cactus,
SnapNames, NameJet (part ownership), Yodle, Dreamscape Networks Limited, 
Donweb.com, Newfold Digital -- just run away.  Run really fast.


Oh, and discounts:  Any firm that tries to get me back with
customer-retention discounts goes straight into the "bury them, with
gloves" category.  Likewise any registrar that offers first-year
discounts for any new customer.

Why would I object to saving money, you ask?  Who doesn't like
discounts?

Answer:  A firm that does those things is saying you are a sucker if you
are an ongoing, loyal customer, because you are paying more to subsidise 
the firm's ability to woo other customers who switch.  The firm is
admitting that it punishes loyalty, and takes you for granted.

Back to Michael's posting, this time listing some of the things _wrong_
with Web.com Group's Network Solutions:

  IPv6 - last I dealt with them on that they still rather sucked, if I
  recall correctly - e.g. I think you had to do a support ticket to do
  IPv6 glue records

Right.  Like IPv4 glue records, this is Registrar 1a.

  Sometimes they'll opt you in for stuff you didn't ask for and don't
  want ... e.g. just gave you a crud yourbasedomainname.somecrudTLD
  without your asking or wanting ... then they of course want to sell you
  on renewing it.

Exactly the sort of fsckery by which Web.com Group's Register.com
vampirised Cheryl.  And I'm still boiling angry about that.

  They also tend to push lots of announcing clueless offers.  Got
  sf-lug.org?  How 'bout buy up all these sf-tote.someTLD domains, I mean
  tote is like lug, right?  Ugh.

And that.  And, as with autorenew, they make it a _default_ action, so
that, e.g., an 84 year old who's having dementia issues will get fooled 
and spend needless money and get nothing of value.

Joker.com fsckery:

  And sometimes they just suck.  E.g. GDPR ... yeah, can't opt out of
  the privacy goop for whois.

  Need to change glue records?  They were absolutely completely utterly
  incompetent at that - not only could their interface not do it, but the
  information the provided was incorrect, and even with numerous support
  tickets, they couldn't manage to to it. 

Appalling.  I remember when Michael and I discovered that, and I
immediately cross that _formerly_ decent (I think?) registrar off 
the list of possibles.

See the rest of Michael's posting for other examples.  But, guys, while
I stress that I appreciate ther other "I have had good experiences with
$FOO" mentions, Michael is the only one of you I am _sure_ would have 
noticed, e.g., registrar incompetence with glue records or inability to
turn off "domain privacy", etc.