Registrars compete with each other on price and service. Unless you own dozens of domain names, forget price, and concentrate on SERVICE. Service is everything, because of the high cost of straightening out problems in domain registrations. It often takes DAYS to fix even a minor problem. I have personally handed at least 5 incidents that took more than 16 hours each.

The most common things that need to be done are to change DNS servers, and to renew your domain. It is ALL TOO EASY for your domain registration to expire without your knowledge, and for someone else to jump in and register your name. Many registrars have websites that are very difficult to use, and which change frequently. Very few will provide you with a phone number that has an actual human on the other end who can fix problems.

In order to give our customers better service, we consolidated all of our customer registrations to be handled by a single registrar. We make it our business to learn the ins and outs of their procedures and databases. We maintain our own "Domain Expiry" system to ensure that our customers domains do not expire.

The current registrar that we use for our customers is Millenia Software, who are a "Registration Service Provider" for Tucows Inc. The reason we chose them, and went to the work of transferring all of our customers domain registrations to them is that they provide very good service, and we can contact them at any time by phone to straighten out problems.

How to Verify your Registration with whois It is prudent for any domain name owner to occasionally verify that their domain is properly registered. This can be done by querying the "whois" database for your domain. Most registrars have a WhoIs search window. For example, Tucows.com has a WhoIs window. Our registration service provider Millsoft.ca also provides a link to the who is database. Caution: there seem to be several variations of the whois data in different databases, and some of them are quite slow.

Bogus Domain Expiry Notices Several of our customers have received "domain expiry" notifications from third parties soliciting their business. Unfortunately these notifications often have expiry dates that have been obtained from an out of date database. Specifically, it seems that they have access to the old customer database at Network Solutions. I have received several of these notifications for my own domains. The thing to do if you receive one of these is to verify the true expiry date using any one of the whois links above. Note: You will often notice that the registration price they quote is quite low. Don't be tempted unless you have dozens of domains and are prepared to do quite a bit of research into what kind of service you are likely to get. Service is everything, not price.