On the Soapbox

A number of years ago, when I registered a domain at GKG, I was quite pleased with what they had to offer. Domains were only $10 per year, which was less than the best-known budget registrar at the time, Dotster (which is the domain registrar that I was using before GKG). In addition, they offered free e-mail forwarding and e-mail privacy in WHOIS (instead of listing my real e-mail in WHOIS, they listed a @whois.gkg.net e-mail that then forwards to my real e-mail). And for just $5 more per year, I could get a POP3 mailbox for my domain. This was just a couple of years after the end of the Network Solutions monopoly on domain registrations, so competition was just starting to warm up, and at the time, this was a pretty nice package.

So for nearly half a decade, GKG has served me well. But they've been stagnant while the rest of the domain registration industry has undergone massive changes due to intense competition. Network Solutions, once the holder of a government-sanctioned domain registration monopoly now has a market share of less than 9%, and GoDaddy, helped by their infamous Super Bowl ads, is now the top registrar, but only with a 17.5% market share. It's a diverse market with hundreds of ICANN-accredited registrars, and of the 77 registrars with over 100,000 domains, GKG is only the 56th largest.* In addition to lacking the sort of colorful marketing of registrars like GoDaddy, the package that GKG offers with each domain has remained the same over all these years. Their price of a domain registration has dropped slightly to $9 to match GoDaddy's price, and the price of the POP3 mailbox has increased to $8 (not that it matters much, as I now use Google Apps for Your Domain for domain e-mail services; see my previous blog entry for more on that).

This brings me to the 6th largest registrar, Schlund+Partner, better known as 1&1 Internet. According to Netcraft, its $6/yr registration ($3 less than GoDaddy's or GKG's price) is the lowest regular non-promotional price of all the major registrars. And it offers basic DNS hosting/management,** a free 1GB mailbox with with POP3 and IMAP support, e-mail forwarding/catchall, and free private WHOIS listings (which cost an extra $8 at GKG or $5 at GoDaddy) so that in addition to hiding my e-mail from the WHOIS database, it also hides my name, address, and phone number from the WHOIS database. So for $6, I can get what GKG would've charged me $25 for.*** One of my experimental domains is about to expire in a few months, so instead of renewing it with the existing registrar, I'm now in the process of transferring it to 1&1. All my other domains won't expire until late 2007, so I won't bother with transferring them until later.

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* And for those who care, DreamHost is 58th, but at its current rate of growth, it should overtake GKG very soon.

** It's not very advanced, but it does save me the trouble of getting a ZoneEdit account for sites that have fairly simple DNS needs.

*** Of course, I don't actually choose to go with the $25 package from GKG because GAFYD is now providing e-mail and while private registrations are nice to have, they are not necessary.