Domain name registration
Our favorite place to register domain names is
Mapname.
These are the three things we like about
Mapname
and the reasons why we use their service:
- Excellent pricing
- DNS management
- Respect for the individual
Excellent Pricing
If you buy domain name registrations at
Mapname
one at a time the price is $16.95.
You can buy 25 or more at once for $7.95 each.
These are recorded as wholesale credits which you can use to purchase and renew domain names.
They have intermediate levels as well, with discounts starting at two domain registrations.
You can us the wholesale credits to purchase multiple years,
so you do not need 25 domain names to take advantage of the wholesale pricing.
You can also leave the wholesale credits lying around until you need them.
The wholesale system is as easy as can be to use.
You do not need to apply for special pricing like at many registrars.
You can buy credits whenever you want.
The same price applies to all the TLDs that they support, which are the six
general TLDs: biz, com, info, name, net and org, plus the two country codes: ca and us.
Some registrars offer even cheaper bulk pricing, but not much cheaper,
and we like the DNS Management at
Mapname
better.
When you compare all the DNS Management features
Mapname
includes to the extra prices you pay at other registrars,
you will find
Mapname's
$16.95 price competitive and their $7.95 wholesale price a real bargain.
DNS Management Services
The domain name registrations come with
Mapname's
complete DNS Management service.
One price for all the features.
They do not try to get you in cheap with lost leaders and then upsell you for every little thing.
The DNS Management service includes many features other registrars charge for or do not supply.
The DNS Management includes optional private registration,
which means people cannot get your email address, or even the fact that you are the owner
of a domain name.
They provide full DNS Management so you can set A, CNAME and MX records.
There are no restrictions on the number of records.
If you do not know what these are,
they point your domain name to your webserver and mail server.
They have domain name forwarding, which lets you set up your domain or a subdomain
to forward to another place.
We use this feature to forward all our root domains to the www subdomain, like this:
http://domain.ext --> http://www.domain.ext/
Their A, CNAME and forwarding records are all in the same form,
which makes the DNS records easy to manage, and you can see all your
subdomains in one place.
The forwarding comes with optional domain masking.
This is useful when you have free webhosting and you want people to see your domain name in their
browser's address bar.
This way people see http://www.mywebsite.com instead of
http://www.freenet.com/mywebsite.
You can configure the domain masking with meta tags so search engines
index your website.
You should avoid domain masking because it limits search engine indexing to only
the meta tags and not the information on your pages.
If you have to use domain masking this feature avoids shutting your website out of search engines.
Email Forwarding
A super useful feature is their email forwarding.
I do not know of any other registrar that includes email forwarding in
their base price, if at all.
Instead of configuring your DNS with an email server,
you can set up email addresses to forward wherever you like.
We use this feature all the time.
This is great because we do not have to set up mail servers for every domain name.
We can use
Mapname
to forward the email for a domain to our main email address.
Many of our small customers already have email addresses
and do not want to check another email address for their website.
With this feature, we can easily set up info@domain.ext to forward
to their email address without configuring a mail server just for them.
There is no limit to the number of email addresses.
We use this email forwarding for some websites that have family names.
We give everyone their first name at the family name and forward the
email to their personal email address.
Respect for the Individual
Years ago, we had been using GoDaddy when one day, we got an email
from GoDaddy that said they would shut us down if we did not stop "spamming".
This made me mad.
Who says we were "spamming" and who made GoDaddy the Internet police.
We had not been happy with their service anyway, being a pain to use,
and this gave us the motivation to find something better.
We did a lot of research looking at many registrars and decided to give
Mapname
a try.
One of the questions we asked
Mapname
was what was their policy on monitoring our business.
Their answer was our business was our own business, not theirs, exactly what we wanted to hear.
As long as what we were doing was legal and not causing a problem for them,
everything was fine.
Customer Service
While their customer service has always been respectful and knowledgeable,
often times their customer service is missing in action.
They have a contact form on their website and generally are pretty good
about responding within a few days.
Sometimes they respond within a day, but they might not respond for a few days,
and sometimes not all.
By "respond", I mean respond to the problem you reported.
You may never get a reply.
They may fix the problem and send you a reply,
or they may fix the problem and not send you a reply.
Sometimes you may have to contact them more than once to get the problem fixed.
They do not publish their phone number on their website,
but their are ways to find out their phone number.
You can leave a message, but I have never heard back.
Believe one of my customer's went off the deep end once and did get a call back,
but that is no fun.
The missing customer service is the worst when you feel like you need them the most,
when there is a serious problem.
Likely everyone else is experiencing the same problem and they are overwhelmed with problem reports.
If you have to have great customer service they will give you a heart attack,
but if you use Google's Adsense, you know how bad customer service can be.
At least at
Mapname
they do eventually respond and fix your problem.
I suspect that they are not staffed to provide customer service,
which is all right with me.
I use
Mapname
for the quality of their computer system.
I would rather pay $7.95 for a great system and weak customer service,
than pay more for better customer service.
Despite not getting back with you in a consitently timely manner
By Andrew Weitzen on August 11, 2007
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