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New option, new registrar reselling through Drak.net's provider: http://www.domainspricedright.com/ Nope, bad:

This afternoon, WildWest Domains (GoDaddy) refused to cancel us at the end of our billing period for the services in June, and instead canceled as of that very moment. "Domains Priced Right" is GoDaddy. It's their reseller account that they merge people into after their reseller account is "abandoned".

Apparently, they were not all that enthusiastic regarding the reason we were leaving.

It was quite an...ah... enlightening conversation. :)

No, I think it was vindictive - We paid $229.00 for the super reseller thingy a year, so they kept $40 of the money we directly paid them and nuked the service early. Then we got around $100 a month in commission because we had quite a number of folks on there, and we priced it pretty low since that was the purpose of getting the Interface, and they'll keep that couple of hundred dollars as well.

Yeppers, all in all, pretty unethical, but not unexpected considering their reputation. They're a hard sell, shove it down your throat, our way or the highway kind of company, and it's pretty well known that ceasing to do business with them is not really something that they like.

So, $250 lost, lesson learned, and I know what registrar I won't recommend to anyone. :)

Current domain name registrar:

1&1 ~$6/year but I don't think they extend a year when you transfer in? In any case, the price is to draw people in and get them to buy cheap, but terrible, hosting services. Just doesn't seem sustainable...

Best Bets

From going through the "list of ICANN accredited registrars" in alphabetical order:

• BlueRazor ~$7.25 -- they don't do bulk management/discounts at this time
• Second Tier from ICANN list:
  • FoxEdge.com ~$7
  • Answerable - tried, terrible control panel, ~$6.99 (looks like a reseller)

Note: tons on the iCANN list are fronts for snapdomains and Namescout.

Other Options

• DrakNet Domains - $8.80 a year ( http://www.draknetdomains.com/ )
• Nearly Free Speech - $7.50; they're actually reselling from Public Domain Registry, which is a front for ResellerClub.com, a Directi business (as is Answerable); the best it gets, at $3,000 up front, is $6.49 for a regular domain.
• OpenWebSource.com ~$8.88 - right cause, but I think just a reseller for myorderbox.com

Investigated and Unsuitable

• GKG.net - no services whatsoever, forwarding or even assigning DNS records costs extra. "Host elsewhere" is allegedly free, so this may be an option for VPS hosted sites where we manage the nameserver.
• ResellOne (Everyone's Internet) ~$6.50 -- put down a huge deposit to get that rate, and their interface, the technology on their own site, was so bad I wouldn't trust them with a dime.

Tried and Evil

• Active-Domain
• Getting evil: DomainSite.com

Do it ourselves

1. Figure out what's involved
2. Get ICANN accredited
3. Promote the development of open source registrar software
   • Is TDomain manager what we seek?
   • Or any of these Address Management links?