Remember the good old days? Hour-long support call waits (if you were lucky enough to find a phone number for Network Solutions), horrible service, emailing and faxing credentials, little-to-no support, and all of the other wonderful things that NSI gave us in return for their legal monopoly status over domain registrations. But then, like Moses and Ramses, we were freed from their tyranny and competition spread across the land. And it was good.
NSI was bought by VeriSign. Some said it was a bad thing, some said it couldn't get any worse. I am not sure who was right. Customer service improved drastically (though there are many who have recent horror stories) but that is about all that improved. Domain registration is not exactly a big deal. If done correctly, you pay once a year and forget about it. Most people only think about it when there are problems. So how did VeriSign blow this? First off, they changed the name from NSI to VeriSign. Dumb move. Eventually they realized this and changed it back with one of the funniest/dumbest sounding press releases ever.
So, while NSI/VeriSign/NSI discussed ground-breaking ideas like “corporate name reversion”, Go Daddy and other registrars began taking new customers from the old guard with a simple strategy: same service for less money. Not exactly rocket science, huh? Right now, you can get a .com at Go Daddy for $7.95 a year. There are probably hundreds of other places you can register a domain, all with different prices. This is the joy of competition. So now, some two or more years since NSI/VeriSign/NSI was first faced with competition wielding lower prices, what is the current price for a .com at NSI? $35, the exact same price as 4 years ago, when they were a monopoly. Does it really take a board of directors to figure out the problem here? Why would I pay $35 for the exact same thing I can get elsewhere for $8? Answer: I wouldn't. Period.
Even if the competition didn't have a price that was a fraction of NSI's, I would probably still switch due to their underhanded business practices. They backed down from their wildcard DNS hi-jacking recently but last year they were sued successfully due to other fraudulent practices. In 2001, they “agressively” stepped-up their campaign of selling your data to direct marketers. I have 2 domains with them and I recieved a letter from them 2 weeks ago that clearly indicated that it was time-sensitive and required immediate response. This was my SECOND notice from NSI regarding my expiring services. The “expiring services” in the letter do not expire until March, 2004 and August, 2004. How nice of them.
Those services will be gone before they expire, though. Go Daddy not only has extremely low prices, they also give me FREE options that NSI charges for, including email forwarding, domain forwarding, and other things not even available at NSI. Plus, for the privacy conscious, you can make the domain a “private” listing so your name and address doesn't show up in WhoIs and your total cost is still around half of NSI's yearly rate.
NSI was recently sold and hopefully the new owners will realize the world has changed since 1999. I know I have.