Best Registrar Interface for the Unwashed

[ergophobe]

I'm writing a guide for non-tech people and one part of it is about getting a domain and setting up a blog.

Personally, I use Moniker, but I hate their interface and every single person I have sent to Moniker has failed to register a domain without me getting on the phone and talking them through it. So Moniker is an absolute no.

The only other registrars I've used are
- Network Solutions - I hardly remember them as I haven't used them in so long and they are still $35 for a one-year .com registration

- Godaddy - yeah, it's Godaddy. Awful in so many ways, but they are bottom feeders, set up to appeal to the least techy in the world, the kind of person who has vaguely heard of the internet, but is watching the Super Bowl and decides to sign up for a domain. My experience is that they purposely make some functions (like outbound transfer) difficult to find and use, but generally have a pretty friendly management interface and, like all registrars these days, a registration interface that bombards the visitor with upsells.

So if you were sending your gramma someplace and wanted her to have the best chance of registering a domain and ultimately pointing it at her hosting provider, where would you send her?


Option #2 would be to recommend hosting and let the host do the domain reg. Personally, this makes me nervous to have my host hold control of my domain too, so I would never do it, but maybe it is the simplest for the gramma crowd.

[ergophobe]

Thanks. This is more an Enom crowd than a Com Laude crowd and perhaps people with fair resistance to trying the whole internet thing. So that's why I'm looking for a solution where they won't get frustrated and give up.

This grows out of efforts to help friends add an online component to their marketing and realizing how even some really smart people who *use* the internet constantly have no idea how it works (on all levels) and how to put it to service for themselves. It's been an education actually.

[grnidone]

I like Dreamhost.  And, I've always had good luck with their "help me" department getting back quickly.

[ergophobe]

I had no idea

We're proud to announce that New Dream Network, LLC (DreamHost's parent company) is an ICANN-accredited registrar!

I assumed they were just a reseller.

Do you use them as both host and registrar?

As a matter of principle, I generally avoid letting a single entity control both the hosting and the DNS, but perhaps I should just send people to a host that gives a free domain with a basic hosting package and be done with it. Dreamhost even has a $97 payout.

I must admit that my prejudice is to think that anyone who pays out $100 for a $9/month shared hosting customer has got to be cutting corners somewhere.