I've had 20 odd domains registered with Discount Domains some of them since 1997.

In that time I've always found Discount Domains a top notch registrar to deal with. Good easy online tools for DNS management and great support when I phone and was talking to someone who actually had the tools to fix things that needed fixing, or tell me where I was going wrong.

In the last year since they were absorbed into Umbrellar I've noticed the support drop considerably. Now when I ring I get someone who I suspect isn't in NZ handed a limited tool set and limited training. Probably enough to handle the run of the mill user enquiries but WAYYYY off the mark on more complex issues.

Each time I've rung with a legitimate issue I've been met with a brick wall to bang my head on. Lately it became too much and I've just shifted all of my domains to Metaname and I can't say enough good about them.

I didn't come here to rag on Discount Domains but it does seem right now they have some real help desk teething problems. I had a embarrassingly wrong response once and got "Sorry, they are new" which on its own I can easily forgive but the final straw for me was a total outage of DNS queries from 2Degrees which I just got finger pointing about followed by the exact same fault with Spark a few days later which also resulted in them initially pointing the finger at spark only to later discover they had an issue with a Maximum queries configuration issue that was being exceeded by the large ISP's. I also have another client who once upon a time had hosted POP accounts at Discount domains. They were removed years ago and the service was moved elsewhere with an MX record change and ever since any small business with a hosted email at Discount domains who tries to email my client getting a bounce from DD's mail servers saying the mailbox doesn't exist. The helpdesk just hand me the brick to headbut telling me the MX record is correct - I know that but something is set manually on their own servers and wrong but they don't understand the issue.

I emailed metaname with a pre-sales technical enquiry and their response about their platform put my mind at ease - Stupidly I didn't think of searching for them on Geekzone which would have done the same as I couldn't find anything negative anyone has ever had to say about them save a minor complaint about added Paypal fee's back in 2014 and I'm used to Credit Card and Paypal fee's being added. While it could be included that means changing pricing structure everytime Paypal or credit cards/banks change their fees.

I emailed support a couple of times - Really shouldn't have as the answers were there right in front of me. Its a VERY simple site but that because it puts in front of you everything you need assuming you have basic DNS knowledge. If you've owned domains and understand TTL's and MX, CNAME and A records etc these guys are for you.

The bit I like most is you can create a new DNS zone on their server BEFORE you start the domain transfer. This means you can create the Zone, populate all of the needed DNS records before you being the transfer. Although with TTL's etc this is generally not needed it give you confidence you can be sure everything is ready before the shift. Then once the domain is transferred you just go into the domain record and change the DNS servers to Metaname meaning your domain is all ready and you don't have to worry about your old registrar pulling the pin on your records before the TTL's have expired and the authoritative DNS servers are changed and live.

Their pricing is competitive, their support is top notch and responsive and once you know the tricks with their Zone editing its a breeze. (And again, those "tricks" are all written succinctly right in front of you if you look - I'm very guilty of not looking and making assumptions, I must be getting too old for this game)

The thing that impressed me most was a forum post about DNSSEC - Someone needed it setup on a Domain and it wasn't working with Cloudflare - They contacted support and 30 minutes later got a reply "Try now" and it was all go.

They are definitely small but so are their offerings, they stick to what they do well - They specialise in domain registration and DNS and that's it and they do that very very well.

At this point I'm waiting on one .COM domain to send me the move request email but the other 23 domains are moved and running after a painless experience.