Domain Name Providers that are reliable

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irpegg

142 posts

Master Geek

#2659806 19-Feb-2021 14:41

To be honest your options are going to be limited. Domain reselling is kind of a outdated industry practice now. Back in 2008-2013 in the 'golden age of hosting' a lot clients knew they needed to be online but had no idea what that involved, so resellers filled in that void bundling domains with webhosting services. These days there is so much information and guides from customer focused organisations like Wix, Squarespace that they just tell people to buy a domain directly or give them the right information on how to point DNS and let them sort it out themselves. The bottom line keeps going lower and lower with Cloudflare and Google entering the market at cost too.

Honestly as a consumer, just go to Cloudflare and buy gTLD's and for .nz namespace find the cheapest provider possible then transfer it into a premium registrar at no cost. What value does a reseller offer? Nothing really, they just ticket clip and add on a margin and send any issues off the domain registrar. The margins for the domain registrar are also absolute trash; people want 2FA, DNSSEC, customised tooling for the grand total of a $5 PER YEAR margin, whilst fielding multiple queries per year. Soon as you have staff working on a ticket for 15 minutes you just lost your margin for the year. I understand that scalability is a thing but the hosting environment has changed also where if these resellers aren't buying other offerings its a waste of time. So you can see why business have moved away from it and now focus on offering a support model.

mattwnz

20164 posts

Uber Geek

#2659809 19-Feb-2021 14:48

Except try getting support when you need it from a cheap or free provider. A lot of it is self service and no or little support. Some also may charge for support via a pay per call number and some may have a support plan. The problem is when things don't work properly. eg emails aren't being delivered and get blocked, or just disappear. Many people want someone to contact quickly when that happens .

irpegg

142 posts

Master Geek

#2659814 19-Feb-2021 14:56

Yeah absolutely, and as a business i would rather have my 5 domains and go direct to the wholesale, all the information and guides these companies have built up have made updating DNS and renewing a domain easy. What point do i need to go to a reseller who is going to charge me $50 for domains when i get them for $25 and they don't really do anything, i can't think of anything overly complex that needs a reseller involvement in this day and age? More often the reseller will have to go the same source anyway, again just a middle man.

But my point is, reselling is more and more redundant to offer a service when the market is so overly saturated. These people who have 200+ domains are generating you 1k a year and are the majority of support cases and time spent trying to service their clients, its just not really profitable anymore so seems like more providers are moving away from it, hence the existence of these threads.

This is just from what I've seen when i worked in the industry a few years ago

Drelly

27 posts

Geek

ID Verified

#2659882 19-Feb-2021 15:34

... its just not really profitable anymore so seems like more providers are moving away from it, hence the existence of these threads.

And this is the crux of the problem. Email issues can suck a lot of time and my clients have been used to getting email for free wrapped up with their domain name.

SiteHost

4 posts

Wannabe Geek

Trusted

#2659934 19-Feb-2021 17:37

Drelly:

In the same boat but with hundreds of domain names and email accounts.

I've already posted on here about this. We've been hosting sites with SiteHost for years and they've generally been good for that.

We still have domains and email on WebDrive and have been planning for months to move to SiteHost. I recently found out that not only were they going to charge us over $12k to move the mailboxes (didn't think to mention that before) but that the email quotas and notifications they advertise don't actually exist as a feature, so we have no way of knowing how much storage our email clients are using without manually checking every mailbox.

I've looked all over the place and low-cost email services for resellers seem to be almost non-existent! Would be grateful for any tips on other options!

Commenting on individual cases like this in a public forum is something we try to avoid because there’s only so much we can say, but if you continue to work with us on this Drelly I’m confident we can address your concerns.

We also know this situation sucks. Migrations are hard, and your current provider has let you down and this work has been forced on you. But this work is bespoke and tricky in an industry that hasn’t made this as easy as it should be. Trust me, we get it. However, for everyone's benefit I would like to address a couple of points in your post.

SiteHost is not the cheapest provider and since I started the business in 2004 we haven’t tried to be. Instead we try to offer exceptional value and quality. If you want a cheaper service you can find one, but I genuinely believe it will be hard to beat the combination of cost, quality and products we provide, backed by our excellent team.

To be more specific our email hosting costs about $1 NZD per mailbox per month, or $12 + GST per year. We have to do quite a lot for that $12, and it’s safe to say we don’t offer this service to make money. We offer it because we feel we need it alongside our other offerings and I would argue that after your domain it is the most valuable service a business can have.

As I mentioned above migrations can be tricky projects which require more back and forth than you’d expect. Thinking “automation should make this cheaper, faster, better” is nice in theory, however in practice the edge cases seem to increase with the number of mailboxes. In the wild the quickest our team has been able to migrate mail accounts in bulk is around 10 minutes per mailbox (or $30 + GST at our hourly rate of $180 + GST). For someone paying $12 per year there really isn’t any migration cost we can afford to absorb. As a side note websites seem to follow a similar pattern taking on average 1-2 hours to migrate per site.

On email quotas, we currently offer non-enforcing email quotas and I think this is actually an extremely useful feature that we perhaps haven’t explained to you fully. The reason we offer non-enforcing email quotas is that it provides a better end user experience and lowers support requests. We don’t consider it to be a good experience to have end users hitting limits and services stopping for such a small amount of additional cost. We are obviously keen to expand our services and are very open to customer feedback but honestly I would take one customer upset about non-enforcing quotas over hundreds of end users having email unexpectedly stop working any day of the week.

Notifications don’t exist, that is true, we can and should do better in this area. That being said, our platform is open, our API is well documented and everything you see in the Control Panel is available via our API. So, this afternoon after receiving your feedback we have implemented a notification script using our API. This script will email you when a customer goes over their quota. This took us a couple of hours to whip up, and we’ve published it on Github here: https://github.com/sitehostnz/mail-quota-notification

I have also opened a ticket for the team to begin investigating implementing this same functionality inside the Control Panel.

When a customer is upset we clearly haven’t got the formula right. We know we aren’t going to please everyone, all the time no matter how hard we try, but I would be keen to discuss with you how we could have handled this project better so we can improve in the future.

Lastly, you mention that you are struggling to find low-cost email services, there is likely a reason for that. If Kiwis want investment into great services in Aotearoa, they need to start voting with their wallets. Try asking your suppliers “What could you offer if I was willing to pay more?” - You might be surprised at the answer.

We are trying to offer exceptional value and quality. A business can only do that on sustainable margins.

The easy path here would be to offer a cheaper service at the cost of quality. But I know that would cost our customers much more in the long run than they’re currently paying.

Cheers,

Quintin Russ

Founder & Technical Director

Drelly

27 posts

Geek

ID Verified

#2659953 19-Feb-2021 19:02

Thanks Quintin. I really appreciate the special attention you've given my problem.

I have used SiteHost website hosting for 9 years because your services are high quality, reliable, flexible and well-supported, not because it's the cheapest. Unfortunately, after 20 years of domain registration with WebDrive, my clients have come to expect all their email to be free, so *any* added cost on top of their fear of changing all their email settings is "rocking their boat". Personally, I'd rather they paid more for better services but most customers have the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" view of email.

maffey

41 posts

Geek

ID Verified

Lifetime subscriber

#2659956 19-Feb-2021 19:11

Qunitin and Drelly

Seriously, 7pm on a Friday and still working. I hope you guys are on Wifi in a pub somewhere :)

Quic Broadband

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networkn

Networkn
32357 posts

Uber Geek

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Trusted

Lifetime subscriber

#2659970 19-Feb-2021 20:06

Drelly:

Thanks Quintin. I really appreciate the special attention you've given my problem.

I have used SiteHost website hosting for 9 years because your services are high quality, reliable, flexible and well-supported, not because it's the cheapest. Unfortunately, after 20 years of domain registration with WebDrive, my clients have come to expect all their email to be free, so *any* added cost on top of their fear of changing all their email settings is "rocking their boat". Personally, I'd rather they paid more for better services but most customers have the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" view of email.

For what's it's worth and despite not knowing your business, or it's customers specifically, *most* businesses are prepared to pay a little extra if it means they get something extra.

I have found that communicating earnestly, and honestly with customers and showing where the value lies to them. Sometimes that can be hard, because of the way *we* view it. Often though, its also about helping people see the reality of a situation. It's pretty unlikely that there will be much offered free in the long term moving forward, regardless of what has been in the past.

Over 25 years in IT, it has surprised me on multiple occasions, that often, if when I raise things with a feeling of dread related to telling a client their costs will go up, they are much less worried about it, than I was!

I recommend picking a few less price sensitive customers, and having a discussion with them. Once a few have switched and you have done the process and know it thoroughly, and believe in it, approaching the other customers, with more internal confidence, will help move them too. By the time you are at the last 25% of customers, the conversation in your head around how you pitch to those final clients, will have changed. There will be some clients who are resistant, be prepared for it, Be OK with it, and circle back to them in 3 months time and gently re-raise it. Some people just need some time to adjust to a new idea. (when I first started in business I would not even *consider* any lease for more than 6 months, then it was 12 months. Last year I signed a 6 year lease and didn't really worry about it much at all).

As was mentioned above, in a business, other than their domain (which they usually only know about as it relates to the website and email), email is the most value IT resource. If you don't believe me, turn it off for 3 hours and see the size of the reaction.

Bottom line is though, if you are like me, if you don't believe in it, it's going to be hard to sell to someone else. It doesn't have to be what YOU would do, but it does have to be what YOU would do, if you were in THEIR position.

Not sure if that helps. Hope it does.

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