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I’ve been using GoDaddy for years. When I started using them many moons ago, they offered cheap hosting and domain registrations in what was a generally expensive market. I purchased my first .COM and .NET domain for ~$3.95 each. Years later, all GoDaddy hosts is advertisements for their useless or misleading products.

All I want is three things:

• Domain registration for cheap
• Privacy or proxy domain registration
• Variable DNS

Seems simple, right? GoDaddy offers all three things I mention above, but the domain registration cost has been rising recently and the Domains By Proxy service they own is expensive and buried in controversy. At least their DNS works as expected.

When it became time to renew one of my domains, I decided it was time to give GoDaddy the boot.

I did all the things expected of one when one wants to find a new registrar. I scoured the web for forum posts, blog entries, and reviews of registrars. After many hours of searching, I narrowed my search down to two companies: Name.com and NearlyFreeSpeech.NET. Ultimately, after reviewing both services further, I went with NearlyFreeSpeech.NET (NFSN).

I like simple. NFSN is has a painfully simple dashboard, free account creation, and very easy pricing. They work slightly different than most hosting companies (for a lot of reasons). Yes, they are a hosting company, but that doesn’t mean I have to pay to have them host anything at all. Domain registrations are about average in terms of cost ($8.59 as of this writing), but I love their policy statement. Their private domain registration service proudly announces that it privatizes domains! Though this may seem a given, DomainsByProxy fails at what it is suppose to do for $19.95 a year! For only $0.01 a day, they provide a mailing address, email, fax, and mail inbox for my domain. They assert that, short of a court order, my identity will not be revealed. In short, they say they do their job. A quick Google search shows no complains.

Ideally, I wanted free private registration, but $0.01 * 365 = $3.65. Add that to the cost of the domain, and I’m only paying $12.24 a year for domain registration and domain privacy. That’s about $15 less than GoDaddy for the same services! Darn GoDaddy and their useless upsells.

I’m now one day in to my service (it took about 2 hours for the full transfer to complete–I have another tirade about that), but it’s doing what I expect!