The Best Domain Registrar
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This post outlines some basic information about domain related services and why Google Domains is best registrar for most people.
Domain related services
Registering a domain is the first step to building a website, setting up e-mail addresses for the domain, etc. There are several different domain related services that are needed or can be useful in certain situations.
Domain registrar
A domain registrar is paid every year to make a domain like example.com be officially registered and accessible on the internet. The yearly fee varies by registrar and TLD (top level domains), such .com, .info, etc. As part of the domain registration, WHOIS contact information and DNS servers are provided. Registering a domain on its own does nothing besides “domain squatting”. There are additional services that are needed, which are also often offered by registrars.
WHOIS privacy
Every domain is required to have a listed owner and full contact information (a.k.a. WHOIS contact information), which is the domain owner’s personal information (or a registered business). Many registrars offer a “WHOIS privacy” service that puts placeholder contact information that forwards to the domain owner, thus making the easily accessible public contact information anonymous.
DNS servers
DNS servers specify how www.example.com maps into IP addresses that host the site, or where e-mail should be routed for for the domain.
Dynamic DNS services
Dynamic DNS or DDNS services are just regular DNS entries, coupled with simpler and more convenient APIs for updating. Their goal is to make it easier for assigning hostnames, like home.example.com to the typically dynamic residential ISP IP addresses. In order to serve www.example.com from a Raspberry Pi at home, using a DDNS service/API might be simpler to setup than a regular DNS service.
In order to support receiving or sending from [email protected], separate e-mail services are required. Options range from doing it manually, using the email service provided by the domain registrar, or paying for an additional service like Google GSuite (i.e. a Gmail accounts for [email protected])
Web site hosting
This is the most interesting and varied service. For example, hosting can be done using VMs on Cloud computing provides like GCP/AWS/Azure, serving from a Raspberry Pi at home, or using shared hosting services.
Domain registrar considerations
Warning
There are a lot of companies offering domain registration services. There are a few general few concerns to watch out for. Many of those companies have extensive affiliate and reseller programs, and sometimes the company being paid is not the actual registrar providing the service. Companies also often provide cheaper first year teaser or domain transfer rates, after which costs go up. Anecdotally, this industry also seems to have greater than its fare share of customer horror stories.
Bundling
Another concern is that often registrars sell a set of services as one package. For many customers, these can be perfectly fine services in the long term. However, if one part of the bundle is outgrown, customers are still paying for it. For example, a package including registration, WHOIS protection, DNS, shared web hosting, and e-mail hosting for $20/yr is a compelling package. If the e-mail and shared hosting will not be used, a different registrar that excludes those services for $12/yr is a better deal.
Online accounts
Fewer but more secure online accounts is better. Companies like Amazon and Google are giant companies with a vested interest in not having their customers hacked. Many people already have those accounts, and might even have 2 factor authentication setup. Trusting existing important personal accounts with domain registration (as opposed to depending on yet another company’s security practices), plus the convenience of not creating another online account are compelling reasons to use Google or Amazon as your registrar.
Amazon AWS Route53
Route 53 is the Amazon’s Registrar and DNS hosting product. Registration has fairly standard pricing: $12/yr for .com, and it comes with free WHOIS privacy. DNS hosting costs $0.50 per domain per month, plus very small usage charges ($0.40 per million queries).
Amazon is a large, reliable cloud provider, and the general approach of paying for what you use is great. The per-domain DNS hosting cost can begin to add up, however, especially with multiple domains. Route 53 is an Amazon Web Services (AWS) product, and if you’re not already using AWS for other things, it can be a bit of a commitment to set AWS up just for Route 53.
Google Domains
Google’s domain registrar service is called Google Domains. Similar to Route 53, it has a fairly standard registrar pricing of $12/yr for .com, and comes with free WHOIS privacy.
This product is targeted to consumers or small businesses, and does not require setting up a Google Cloud Platform account or project to use. So it’s a bit easier to setup and use than Route 53.
DNS hosting, Cloud DNS optional
Google Domains comes with free DNS hosting that is more than enough for most domains (10M DNS resolutions per year). This is a nice benefit over Route 53.
Google Cloud DNS provides metered DNS hosting services like Route 53, but is a little cheaper. So it’s possible to use Google Domains as a registrar, and pay for Google Cloud DNS hosting. However, it’s simpler and cheaper to just Google Domains for both.
E-mail forwarding
For small sites or projects, sometimes the desired e-mail service is a simple and free email forwarding solution (as opposed to a full e-mail account). Google Domains includes such a service for free, and allows addresses like [email protected] to forward all e-mail to another address, such as [email protected]. However, this does not allow sending e-mail from [email protected]. If e-mail forwarding is not desired or outgrown, paying for GSuite or a similar solution might be a more desirable option that relying on the e-mail hosting provided by DNS registrar.
Domain forwarding
This is a technically a very limited type of free web hosting. Google Domains setting up simple redirects, which can be a nice convenience in some situations.
DDNS
Dynamic DNS essentially implements a de-facto standard HTTP API for updating DNS records. Simple client software package can be configured to run on a home router or computer in order to update this DNS record when the device’s public internet IP changes. This is a convenient service for simplifying the updates of these DNS records, because the DDNS protocol is widely supported.
Summary
The best domain registrar is Google Domains. It provides fairly priced domain registration, with WHOIS privacy. There are no first year/transfer pricing games. There are are no costly bundled extras. The free DNS Hosting is great, and additional free services like email forwarding, host forwarding, and DDNS can be useful in certain situations. Existing Google accounts can be used for registration, and as a large cloud provider, service should be reliable.