Let’s face it: there are so many domain providers around. Many people seem to find it tougher and tougher to find out who to go with.

I guess that’s one problem with a free market system: you tend to get way too many choices.

As a recap from one of my previous posts, you’ve got 2 “kinds” of domain providers. You’ve got domain registrars and their reseller partners.

Domain registrars are really the only entities who can register domain names. But in an effort to possibly expand their business, they form reseller partnerships with various parties (especially webhosting providers).

I hope I’m wrong, but one aspect of human “nature” that hardly changes is that people mainly judge a product or a service on price. After all, we want the most affordable money can buy, right?

Domain registrars like Network Solutions and Register.com still charge up to $35 a year for .com. Then you got Moniker for $9+, then you have Yahoo charging limited $1.99 a year specials somewhere on their site.

Who do you think people will likely turn to?

Unfortunately, there lies one mistake: judging a provider mainly on price. As one of my favorite sayings I learned before goes, “you get what you pay for”.

I mentioned this before in one of my previous posts, but the VeriSign COM NET Registry charges each registrar $6.42 a year for every .com registration, renewal and transfer they process in their system. Many resellers either charge their .com domain registrations far lower than their registrar partner does, or they throw it in free as part of signing up for a hosting package with them.

Depending on their business plans, coupled with how they leverage themselves over time, they may or may not succeed. Some will only provide email or ticket support (both of which are popular means of support for hosting companies), others will not allow certain functions (like registering or changing nameservers), others won’t deal with the really complex issues (especially legal ones) that cost a lot of time and money to possibly resolve.

Generally speaking (at least for now), people won’t really be able to tell the difference between a registrar and a reseller. Then again, they probably don’t care as long as it meets what they expect.

However, if the customer eventually develops a need that’s beyond what the provider is prepared to give, then things can begin to get ugly. The customer might change hosting providers “prematurely”, their domain name gets shut down by the registrar partner for spamming (knock on wood), etc.

Should the customer especially cancel his service with the reseller, sometimes the reseller will do something that goes against what the customer believes. Whether one or the other was in the “wrong” or not depends on certain circumstances, namely what was agreed upon to begin with.

This is the other mistake: not doing your homework prior to signing up. By doing your homework, I mean the small stuff we usually don’t sweat about.

(Off-topic, but you gotta grab a copy of “Don’t Sweat The Small Stuff if you haven’t done so yet. It’s a good read. )

Various successful internet marketers will likely tell you not to sweat those small details. While I actually agree with that to a large extent, unfortunately my long-time work with a domain registrar has taught me that there are certain “small” details you musn’t try to ignore.

For one thing, resellers (again, especially hosting providers) will give you very basic tools and support for the most common technical issues such as changing nameservers or ensuring your website is fully functional. But if something happens that’s beyond their expertise, they’re likely to be forced to ask their registrar partner for further assistance, especially if, again, legal issues occur (like the registrar receives a spam complaint).

A worse scenario is if the domain name gets deleted and is in the redemption period. Resellers cannot redeem a domain name, so they’re likely to refer you to the registrar partner who originally registered and managed the domain name for the reseller.

Fortunately there are a few ways to check whether you’re likely dealing with a reseller or a registrar. First do a WHOIS on the reseller’s domain name and note who’s the sponsoring registrar, although I’ve seen very few exceptions.

Next, ICANN maintains a list of accredited registrars on their website. Any provider who offers .com registrations on their website but isn’t mentioned on ICANN’s registrar listing is not a registrar until such time that ICANN says so.

Finally, and if you’re up to it, read the reseller’s legal fine print to see who they’re possibly reselling for. Usually it’ll say it, usually it won’t, but crosschecking all the details I mentioned above can give you some clues.

But more importantly, read the fine print and/or ask questions. Don’t be afraid to ask any question you think sounds stupid because you’re definitely not going to know your answer, and the reseller isn’t going to assume you know what it is you want to find out.

Whenever people ask me if this provider is “good” mainly because of price and what they’re looking for, I usually go like this:

1. What do you expect the provider to do to handle worst case scenarios?

2. Should they answer they expect them to deal with them nonetheless, is the provider going to likely care about those issues over a possibly at-a-loss contract?

To be fair, though, there are exceptions. Certainly not every reseller is “incompetent”, but I can’t say that majority of resellers are to be doubted since I don’t exactly have any statistics to back up my observations…yet.

All in all, it’s okay to be skeptical about domain providers who seem to offer the moon but possibly fall short. The important thing is to know what exactly you want and expect, and take time to find out if the one you’re looking at is fully prepared and willing to deal with them.