Need registrar advice...

[Steven Cedrone]

Time to renew some domains. Who do you reccomend? I've been using NetworkSolutions (Don't ask), I need cheap and stealth forewarding...

Any suggestions???

Steve

[Janak Parekh]

A good (not cheaper) registrar is register.com. They offer free DNS service, and have a much simpler management interface. They also make it trivial to switch from Network Solutions. I'm slowly moving every domain I administer over.

If you're looking for cheap, cheap, cheap, check out http://www.gandi.net/ - $10/year for a domain. I don't think they'll give you DNS service, but the price is hard to beat. :)

--janak

[Steven Cedrone]

A good (not cheaper) registrar is register.com. They offer free DNS service, and have a much simpler management interface. They also make it trivial to switch from Network Solutions. I'm slowly moving every domain I administer over.


Do they offer stealth forewarding???

Steve

[Janak Parekh]

Care to explain what you mean by "stealth forwarding"? I haven't heard the term. If you're asking if they have services by which www.yourdomain.com can point to any arbitrary server, sure - you can just set up a DNS "A" or "CNAME" record to point to the correct IP address/host.

--janak

[Steven Cedrone]

Care to explain what you mean by "stealth forwarding"? I haven't heard the term. If you're asking if they have services by which www.yourdomain.com can point to any arbitrary server, sure - you can just set up a DNS "A" or "CNAME" record to point to the correct IP address/host.

--janak

Yes, and the address would read "blablabla.com" in the address bar as apposed to "blablabla.hosts.compuserve.com"...

Sorry for the confusion...

Steve

[Janak Parekh]

I believe register.com would do that. Send me an email with details and I can give you a more direct answer. :)

Anyone else have suggestions?

--janak

[Steven Cedrone]

BTW...

Web Forwarding and Stealth Web Forwarding
If you have your web page or web site hosted on a free service (such as Geocities or Tripod) or with the free sapce you get from your internet access provider, then you probably have a long, hard to remember web page address. Using either standard web forwarding or stealth web forwarding, internet users can type in your domain name and they will be redirected to your web site. All you have to do is enter the real address of your web site in your domain settings area on easyDNS and we take care of the rest.

So, what's the difference between standard and stealth forwarding? Standard web forwarding is a simple redirect and once visitors get to your web site they will no longer see your domain name in the location bar, they will see the real address of your web site. However, if you wish to have your domain name stay in the location bar and never have people see the real address of your site then just turn on stealth web forwarding for your domain.

[Janak Parekh]

That was a good start; http://www.easytest.com/ explains in detail what they're doing. They're rewriting your HTML and sticking it in a frameset so the browser doesn't show the URL.

Most registrars don't offer that as it is not strictly a registrar's task (which is helping name resolution). You only usually need such "stealth forwarding" if your URL is not foo.bar.domain.com, but rather foo.bar.domain.com/~blah or some variant where you have more than just the hostname as a URL, or if you're using name-based virtual hosting. I'm, admittedly, not an expert on who else does this; I usually host my stuff on my own computers. :)

--janak

[Dave Beauvais]

I use DNS Central (http://www.dnscentral.com) mainly on the advice of Lockergnome (http://www.lockergnome.com). Their registration fees are very reasonable and they also offer such things as Web and e-mail forwarding (http://www.dnscentral.com/forwarding/) for an additional annual fee. Their e-mail forwarding is really hard to beat if the info on this page (http://www.dnscentral.com/compare/) is accurate. :) They give you ten addresses which you can specify and one catch-all account. Since I don't run my own server, I have an address in my domain forward to my address at my ISP. I've also set up forwards for several members of my family. I've got Outlook (and Inbox on my PPC) set to display my e-mail address in my domain instead of my ISP. This is also good because if/when I switch ISPs I simply go to DNS Central's management page, change the forwarding address, and never have to go through the hassle of mass-e-mailing people to tell them to change their address books.

The "catch-all" address allows literally anything@[domain] to be forwarded to a specified address. I use this when ordering online to help track who is selling my e-mail address to spammers. For example, for shopping at Amazon, my e-mail address is amazon@[domain]. Any spam that is sent to that e-mail address is probably the result of Amazon selling my info.

They offer two options for Web forwarding: a plain and simple forward where www.domain.com goes to www.isp.com/~user or "framed forwarding," which is what you referred to as "stealth forwarding." As was described above, you direct people to www.domain.com, a frameset is created, and your page is displayed within a frame. The downside to this is that bookmarking a specific page is nearly impossible since the browser thinks that every page in your site is located at www.domain.com. (You can right-click inside the page and bookmark that way, but I don't think most people do that.)

DNS Central of course does domain transfers from other registrars. They have a nice interface for managing your domains and forwarding options. If you have multiple domains, you can link them all to your "portfolio" and manage them as a group. For example, if you need to change some contact info for one, you have the option to apply those changes to all the domains in your portfolio.

I've been very happy with them for about a year now.

--Dave

[vlado]

The best domain management site for me is www.mydomain.com

Stealth forwarding, unlimited email forwarding and all sorts of high tech Options that I dont understand and ............FREE !

They also provide domain registration but you dont have to use it to use their other free services

[Pony99CA]

They offer two options for Web forwarding: a plain and simple forward where www.domain.com goes to www.isp.com/~user or "framed forwarding," which is what you referred to as "stealth forwarding." As was described above, you direct people to www.domain.com, a frameset is created, and your page is displayed within a frame. The downside to this is that bookmarking a specific page is nearly impossible since the browser thinks that every page in your site is located at www.domain.com. (You can right-click inside the page and bookmark that way, but I don't think most people do that.)

I agree that showing all of your pages as www.domain.com is ugly, but it may be an advantage for some sites -- namely those that want to discourage deep linking.

When I want to bookmark a page on a site like that, I right-click and use the "open frame in new window" function. That ends up opening the frame in a browser and showing the URL in the address bar.

I wonder if it would be possible to get around showing all of your pages with the same domain for framed forwarding. For example, could someone write a Javascript function that put the correct virtual URL in the address bar?

With this script, if my home page is www.domain.com, and it's hosted on www.isp.com/~me, anybody typing in www.domain.com/reviews/product.html would see that in the address bar instead of www.isp.com/~me/reviews/product.html (assuming they had scripting on).

Steve

[Pony99CA]

The best domain management site for me is www.mydomain.com

Stealth forwarding, unlimited email forwarding and all sorts of high tech Options that I dont understand and ............FREE !

They also provide domain registration but you dont have to use it to use their other free services
I was doing a search on an unrelated topic, and came across this thread. Seeing it reminded me that I forgot to thank Vlado for bringing mydomain.com (http://www.mydomain.com) to my attention.

I used it when I set up the domain for my Silicon Valley Pocket PC (http://www.svpocketpc.com) Web site. There have been a couple of issues with service (one where domains weren't resolving because someone had moved some Al Jazeera site to them; another just past where their E-mail servers were down, causing me to not get E-mail for a day or two), but they were corrected quickly.

For a free service, I can recommend them. So, thanks Vlado! :-)

Steve

[dotcomguy]

Godaddy (http://www.godaddy.com)!!

[Pony99CA]

Godaddy (http://www.godaddy.com)!!
If you just want a registrar and domain forwarding, the price looks decent. However, it doesn't seem to provide unlimited E-mail addresses and forwarding for that price (or at all).

Steve

[dotcomguy]

Godaddy (http://www.godaddy.com)!!
If you just want a registrar and domain forwarding, the price looks decent. However, it doesn't seem to provide unlimited E-mail addresses and forwarding for that price (or at all).

Steve
Yes, well Godaddy is for a different target audience, I would say. Godaddy caters to those who want to register a domain and host it elsewhere, which is what I prefer to do. If you are hosting your web site with a hosting company, you don't need these features from the registrar, in which case, Godady is ideal. The price is great.

On the other hand, Godaddy does offer several other services, from domain forwarding to e-mail addresses, to hosting. You can forward domains and subdomains for free; e-mail forwarding costs a little extra ($0.99 for 5 e-mail addresses).

[Jason Dunn]

I use www.thenic.com for all my domain registering needs.

[DerekTheGeek]

Hi All,

Can anyone suggest a registrar with good domain management tools? I used Register.com in the past and I really liked their newer tools however they have the worst service I have ever come across. The also turned on "domain renewal" without my consent and automatically charged my credit card creating a huge fiasco with my bank account.

So can anyone suggest a reputable registrar that has good management tools that would allow me to change the DNS records (e.g. CName, MX, forwarding, etc)? Thanks!

- Derek

[Pony99CA]

So can anyone suggest a reputable registrar that has good management tools that would allow me to change the DNS records (e.g. CName, MX, forwarding, etc)?
Did you check out MyDomain (http://www.mydomain.com) as I mentioned above? They offer $8.50 domain registration and what seem to me like pretty decent domain tools for free. Specifically, they offer both URL and E-mail forwarding (with catch-all support), CName and MX capabilities. See their benefits page (http://www.mydomain.com/domains_benefits.php) for more information.

They aren't perfect, of course. I have experienced a few outages (not many, but one was mentioned above), and my E-mail forwarding got cancelled for a few days last month because my ISP was supposedly bouncing E-mail sent to my real account. However, I can't complain too much given the price. :D

For a personal or information site, they're great. If you're trying to run a business, the few problems I've had may be major issues for you.

Steve