Network Solutions

[KryptoNyte]

When I first started using this company's domain services back in the 1990's, they were on the leading edge of Internet Services. Today, I routinely can't get emails sent and received in under 40 minutes.

Thinking I was doing something fantastic for our family, I purchased a domain name (our family name) and domain services eons ago, and have maintained it religiously year after year, painfully so since web.com got a hold of the company, and of course the price keeps increasing while the services continue to degrade. In the past 5 years or so, the youth in our family have all but abandoned our own domain name because they can get emails through in milli-seconds using their 'free' gmail accounts.

Network Solutions actually have an option in their automated menu system for folks that are having trouble with 'delayed' emails - of course you will wait hours on hold to get a support rep after selecting this option. Obviously, I need to exit this situation instead of paying out each year for failing services.

What are you Internet veterans doing these days for reliable domain services?

[peternm22]

I use Namecheap for registering domains. They provide DNS too if you need it. I use Cloudflare for DNS (they have a free plan).

As far as email goes, I use G Suite from Google. I think it's currently $5/user a month. I've had it for so long though, I'm grandfathered in on their free plan for 25 users.

Namecheap also offers free email forwarding if you use their DNS (I think they support up to 100 email addresses). I think they offer more full featured email solutions if you pay for them.

[KarylFStein]

I use Namecheap as well. Before that GoDaddy, (but last time I looked at things Namecheap was, well, cheaper for what I wanted). Before that I ran my own registered nameservers, (and also paid a lot for static IPs ).

For email I used to run my own server, but then Comcast started blocking port 25. So even though I run my own web servers, I bought a hosting package from Namecheap as that was again the cheapest option I found to provide multiple email accounts with secondary MX and the like. I use fetchmail to pull email every minute from the Namecheap accounts and feed that into my local Postfix server. The lag is not bad unless you're waiting for some "verification" email and it takes a couple minutes to show up .

The last time I looked at prices for what I wanted was about 5 years ago, but Namecheap won then. And it has been reliable. The only thing I'd like to see from them is an IPv6 dynamic client, (an IPv4 is available). But in the few years I've been running IPv6, Comcast hasn't changed my network allocation, so the AAAA records I had to manually create haven't needed to be modified. Also DNSSEC is only supported on certain TLDs if that's a concern.

[NetworkGuy]

For my business account, I use DNSimple.com to register Domains and Office365 for email.

For my personal use, I use webhostinghub.com for my Domain, web site and email.

[KryptoNyte]

Thanks for the comments folks.

Well, namecheap is out. They live on the ticket system otherwise known as "we'll get back to you when we get around to it." No phone support option whatsoever.

dnsimple looks to be a smaller version of namecheap. Put in a ticket for problems, and their team of 15 people will get after it, at some point.

Godaddy is what my workplace uses. Most of the time it's good, sometimes not. They do have a support phone number where a human will tell you it's going to be alright - and then put in a ticket for you

Look, I don't mind paying for a nice website interface to get everything configured, solid services, and a real human for support once in a while, but I don't know who does that anymore. Honestly, I don't know who can compete with Google's speed in sending/receiving an email. The most surprising thing is that web/email hosting has never cost me more per year than it does now, and the services have never been this bad (network solutions anyway).

Anyone?

[peternm22]

I know Namecheap use to have live support chat (it looks like they still do). I've used it in the past and didn't have any problems.

[jbuszkie]

I switched to google domains for my domain service.

So far I'm pretty happy...

[NetworkGuy]

The one time I had a domain problem, dnsimple responded and resolved it in less than an hour. I have been happy with their service.

We were using Studio Press for hosting, but they have just been acquired by WP Engine. We will probably switch to them.

[Carlton Bale]

Originally Posted by jbuszkie

I switched to google domains for my domain service.

So far I'm pretty happy...

Ditto

[Steve20A]

I know I'm late to the thread, but I use 1and1.com. I get the domains from them and use their e-mail management setup to route any mail sent to "mydomain.com" to a gmail id for processing. (On gmail, I use rules to parse the email addresses and forward them to various other email ids.) Basically, send *.mydomain.com to xyz@gmail.com.

The way 1and1 works is to set up MX (I think is the correct name) records that route the email directly to gmail - 1and1, itself, never does any email processing, so can't add any delay to the process. You could use any email system, doesn't have to be gmail.