The top 3 dealers for makers who have a domain buying problem
I have this bad habit of buying new domains every couple of months, and frankly it's getting ridiculous.
Twitter tells me I should rather build before I buy, but Twitter also tells me I should maybe validate before I build, and sometimes it all just feels so condescending. Maybe I just have this cool idea for a product name, okay? I don't need the judgement.
Randomly buying domains are like buying junk food - it's a vice I likely won't every drop, so I might as well embrace it, try to rationalise it, and start doing it cleverly.
And yes, I'm posting my personal issues here just to drag you along down with me, so buckle up.
First, the the top 10 best domain name registrars
For me, a good domain name registrar needs to;
A) save me money
B) be easy to use
C) come with some perky bonuses
And, because I tend to procrastinate just as much as I buy domains, I thought why not document this whole ordeal for others to indulge in too?
So now I have another damn needy project to babysit, Riks Reviews. Here's my whole post on the best domain name registrars for this year. Or skip all that and just see the results in this post.
Anyway, I tracked down the top 10 recommended domain name registrars from sites like IndieHackers, HackerNew and /r/startups. This was from posts all the way back in 2018ish to the present.
I then excluded all the ones that had a bad rep, looked sketchy, or that seemed to be more for corporates, and whittled it down to this list;
- Namecheap
- Google Domains
- Hover
- Gandi
- Iwantmyname
- Njal
- DNSimple
- AWS Route53
- Porkbun
- Cloudflare
Nice! But still not enough! That's too much to choose from when a domain craving hits. I need less options, not more.
The top 3!
So I ranked them roughly according to my criteria above - basically the cheapest and with the most bonuses - and ended up with a top 3.
Ugh, I then went through this whole contrived processes of testing them wrt things like security, ease of use and support, and gave them each a score. Took me like a week(what am I doing with my life?)
This final outcome of that schlep was this;
Final results
The short of it is that I’d recommend;
- Cloudflare if you are on the more technical and demanding side
- Porkbun if you want domain buying and management to be as fast, easy and cheap as possible.
- And if you really value support, Namecheap is your best bet.
Thanks for reading. Now go buy that domain.
