Which is the best domain registrar – a review of 1&1
7/08/20071&1 is perhaps the best domain registrar I have come across. With a price as low as USD 6.99 a year, I can have any dot com registered. Compare that with Godaddy and Yahoo and other registrars, and you will realize that 1&1’s pricing is the most competitive. It even comes cheaper than the standard Indian registrar’s fee of Rs. 499.00 a year (around USD 12.00 or so).
The service also provides a dashboard from where you can mix and edit the DNS and MX settings. You get an email address on your custom domain and five sub domains free of cost. The customer service is prompt and I receive replies to my emails in a few hours. I cannot say the same for the support service on the phone.
Besides these, the most important reasons for me to choose 1&1 were:
1. Free private registration – Anybody can check my contact details from my domain on the whois register. Private registration is a feature that basically means your registrar puts its name in your place on the whois database so that your information is not public, thus saving you from many spam messages. Not a big deal for many, but if you do not want to disclose your details so much for any reason, private registration becomes important. I checked with many Indian registrars and such an option was rare to find here. 1&1 provides this for free . Compare that to Godaddy that provides this feature at USD 8.00 extra.
2. As someone tinkering around with Blogger custom domain and Google Apps, I find it much easier to use a registrar that is recognized enough by Google to provide instructions on navigating through the registrar’s system. Here is the explanation for configuring Wordpress and connecting to my MySQL database.
Now one thing to be wary of while registering multiple domains with 1&1:
If you are using the ‘Instant domain’ package like me, and plans to register multiple domains; do NOT go into your dashboard and click ‘Add new domain’ to add one. Doing so will make your new domain as part of the package you already have with your first domain.
Remember you can get only five sub domains with one package. People, like me, will often assume that they will get five sub domains with one domain registration. 1&1 customer service mentioned on its mail that five free sub domains is per package and not per domain. So if you add a new domain under your current package, you will still be get only 5 sub domains irrespective of the number of domains you add. This happened with me and it was confusing and irritating. I think they should have put this warning up while I was trying to register a second domain.
So if you want to register a second domain, the workaround is to go through the 1&1 homepage. In between one of the steps, they will ask if you are a current customer. Click yes there and you will be further provided with an option of including the new domain in the package you already have or in its entirely new package. Choose the latter option.
You can opt for transferring domains to a new ID, but I suppose that only works when you have two IDs with 1&1. It does not work if you just have one ID currently. This basically means that once you register two domains in one package, you are losing five sub domains for good.
Also check out how to configure Feedburner My Brand with 1&1.
Palin Ningthoujam, Digital Strategist @ 
There are 8 comments in this article: