Registrar Wars: 1&1 vs. GoDaddy

As a domain investor it is essential to pick a registrar that meets your needs. With so many registrars out there it is sometimes difficult to determine who the best one is until it’s too late. This has been my experience with both 1&1 and GoDaddy. Both meet my needs in different ways, and both fall short in key areas.

First is private registration. This is a completely free feature with 1&1 and an essential tool for any domain investor that wants to keep their domains as protected as possible. With GoDaddy you’ll pay at least $6.99/year for private registration with their "Protected" option hitting over $20/year for what is considered unbreakable protection. If you have a portfolio of 100+ names you will end-up paying whopping $699/year+ to privately register your domains with GoDaddy. If you use 1&1 this will cost you $0.00/year – BIG DIFFERENCE!

On the other hand making changes to multiple domains with 1&1 takes an infinite amount of time as you can only make changes to one domain at a time. Perfect example – want to change the contact information for 200 domains? With GoDaddy you can do all at once by simply selecting all your domains and entering the contact information once. The whole process takes about 1 minute. With 1&1 you have to select each domain individually and change the contact information – for 200 domains this takes well over 3 hours of unbelievably repetative text-entry – BIG DIFFERENCE!

Both services offer excellent web design services and 1&1 offers some great newsletter tools that you’d oftentimes find yourself paying another service $9.99/month for. GoDaddy has "Hosting Connection" that allows you to setup sophisticated web forums in minutes – sorry, with 1&1 this is a bit more complicated. GoDaddy also has a very easy way to setup MySQL databases just like the guru’s do but in a fraction of the time.

1&1 support will leave you waiting on hold listening to "Ring of Fire" until the cows come home. GoDaddy support is much more prompt and cheerful – full of hope and willing to get the job done. 1&1 tends to default onto the – "you can do it yourself" attitude and is less willing to help their customers reach their goals.

GoDaddy also has far more coupon codes posted online so you can save at least 10% on any order and 20% on most orders if you group your orders together – this is a HUGE money-saver over time.

So which is the best for domainers? I’d say GoDaddy hands-down in all areas except for private registration where they fall very very short. I’d suggest still keeping a 1&1 account just for your domains that you want to keep private registration info so you can save some money. With 1&1’s archaic domain management system there is no way a domainer can manage a large number of domains and their lackluster customer service leaves you waiting on hold for 10+ minutes everytime you have a question.

And the winner is – GoDaddy by a mile and a half! GoDaddy not only makes it easy to manage many many domain names but also provides superior tools for putting premium content on your domains quickly and with little effort. If you have a problem their tech support is there for you and most importantly, willing to help.

Please not that I did not review Fabulous or Moniker which are oftentimes top choice registrars for domainers. I’ll do a separate article on these two but thought it would be important to cover the ten trillion pound gorilla’s first. So if you’re a new domainer looking for a registrar that will give you an edge and scale well with your business – go GoDaddy all the way, you won’t be sorry.

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton