Choosing your registrar
The registrar you use to register your domains isn’t usually something that you spend a lot of time thinking about. Most people will just search for the cheapest registrar and off they go. And truth be told, the registrar you use to register your domain probably won’t matter all that much. But occasionally you will find that the cheapest registrar isn’t always the best to use.
Some registrars will inundate you with offer upon offer to add to your bill. Then once you’ve signed up with them as a customer they continue to send offers to your email. Some of them make their user interface difficult to use so that you have to click through a lot of pages to find what you want. Every page will have some kind of advertising on it so it’s a way for them to increase their ads visibility.
Worse yet some will buy up domains from under your nose as you’re searching for it. They’ll monitor how popular a domain is in the searches and then while you’re in the process of trying to buy it they’ll snatch it up with an automated system. Knowing that the domain is sought after they’ll try to offer it to you for the low low price of hundreds of dollars. Of course they do all this sneaky stuff through subsidiaries so they have plausible deniability, but if you can connect a few dots you’ll see it leads right up to the worst offenders.
By the way, I’ve written up a page on transferring your domains out of Godaddy. It’s not an easy process, though Godaddy has made it a little easier than it has been in the past.
