Domain registration

[junior]

I'm not too familiar in the world of domain name registering so I would love some help.
Basically, I'd like to go and register a .com but there are so many sites that offer registration. The prices also vary by a pretty large ammount. What I would like to know is,
a) Does it make any difference which site I register a name on?
b) Why the price difference? Is it fine just to go for the cheapest deal?
c) Are some of these sites more secure than another? i.e. is it dangerous to be giving credit card details to some of these registration sites?
d) Is there one organisation that handles all the registrations? If so, are all these companies connected to this organisation?
e) Do you have a recommendation for a registration site? That would really help.

Thanks in advance!

[stoid]

Not an expert, but I know that some sites just redirect to your other site, some mirror your data. Uptime.

[tutubibi]

Originally posted by junior
I'm not too familiar in the world of domain name registering so I would love some help.
Basically, I'd like to go and register a .com but there are so many sites that offer registration. The prices also vary by a pretty large ammount. What I would like to know is,
a) Does it make any difference which site I register a name on?
b) Why the price difference? Is it fine just to go for the cheapest deal?
c) Are some of these sites more secure than another? i.e. is it dangerous to be giving credit card details to some of these registration sites?
d) Is there one organisation that handles all the registrations? If so, are all these companies connected to this organisation?
e) Do you have a recommendation for a registration site? That would really help.

Thanks in advance!

a) Like in any business . You want more bang for your buck. You want features like free transfer, good support, etc. All of them will registar your domain but service is the difference.
b) Major registrers are more expensive than some smaller ones. However there are a lot of smaller registrars with a good reputation
c) This is general issue on the internet.
d) There is central maintener for TLD (top level domains like .com) but a lot of companies can do registration for you.
e) I used registerfly.com (www.registerfly.com) couple of times. Never any issues, support is pretty good, price is good and you get free hosting and email. I would recomend them.

Hope this helps.

[junior]

Originally posted by tutubibi
a) Like in any business . You want more bang for your buck. You want features like free transfer, good support, etc. All of them will registar your domain but service is the difference.
b) Major registrers are more expensive than some smaller ones. However there are a lot of smaller registrars with a good reputation
c) This is general issue on the internet.
d) There is central maintener for TLD (top level domains like .com) but a lot of companies can do registration for you.
e) I used registerfly.com (www.registerfly.com) couple of times. Never any issues, support is pretty good, price is good and you get free hosting and email. I would recomend them.

Hope this helps.

Thanks Tutubibi! That url you gave looks nice and official to me! I think I'll register there. Regarding your answer to a). If I simply use a site to register a domain name, no web hosting, then it just becomes a difference of price and preference right? There won't be any extra features will there? It's just that there are a couple of places with great web hosting deals, so I'd probably like to go with them once registered.
Thanks.

[tutubibi]

Originally posted by junior
Thanks Tutubibi! That url you gave looks nice and official to me! I think I'll register there. Regarding your answer to a). If I simply use a site to register a domain name, no web hosting, then it just becomes a difference of price and preference right? There won't be any extra features will there? It's just that there are a couple of places with great web hosting deals, so I'd probably like to go with them once registered.
Thanks.

Yes and no. Yes in the sense that once you register domain it's yours and you can host it wherever you want. However, a lot of registrars offers extra things like free web hosting, url forwarding, free email and so on. So it's not only price but also features. It's ussualy the simplest way to register domain and buy hosting from the same company. You can get good deals there and also save some time (for example updating DNS settings is automatic).
If you just need simple web hosting it makes sense to just registar domain and have free email address with 'catch-all' and use url forwarding to forward your domain to your personal page (for example on .mac or yahoo). So typing www . yourdomain . com would go to www . mac . com / yourhomepage.

[Peyote]

I've been using www.doteasy.com for the past two years and have registered 3 different domains there. I've never had a problem there. For $25/year you get unlimited email accounts, domain registration, and around 20 MB of storage (I think). You can of course upgrade that...I think they have an upgrade special for $8 that gets you like 1000 MB of space and a bunch of other upgrades. I've never had a problem with bandwidth or outages. It works great for me, might want to check into it.