I have a business providing websites (I cater to a certain specialized niche and have tools specialized for those users, this is not a web hosting business, just a "make your homepage using our tools" site for non-technical users), and right now the clients access their sites using a subdomain of my main domain.

I want to offer an extra option on one of my price plans for users to have a domain point to their site on my servers, and I've been looking around for a reseller program. Because some clients already have domains, originally my thought to expedite things was to say "listen, if you want to buy a domain, go here (link to a domain registrar's site) and set your nameservers to (my nameservers), and then tell us what domain you bought and we'll set it up". I don't want to run a whole domain business and have to deal with notifying people in a year when their domains expire, etc., so that would be easiest, but I fear that it's an extra step for my non-technical users, so I'm looking to become a reseller and make it extra easy for them to sign up and have the nameserver stuff done automatically.

SO, here are my findings so far, and I'd love to hear feedback from anyone, sometimes reading about this stuff for too long makes me dizzy, I may be missing something obvious.

The contenders are, in no order:

1. Enom - the most popular on these boards for sure, but I cannot figure out why exactly. Is it the support, the features..? I found their pricing high and their support panel pop-up thing really confusing when I first logged onto them. One poster here recently suggested everyone on these boards recommend Enom because everyone are trying to sell sub-reseller accounts through them, is that part of it? I just don't see straight off why I'd want to pay them 8.95 when I can pay another company 6.95 to begin.

2. Wild West Domains - as an end user I have used and liked GoDaddy, and I really like that Wild West offers private registration services that I can resell. Having said that, their pricing is great if you are going to resell the domains for <$10, but the "we take 25% of your profit" things sucks if you want to sell the domains for more than that makes the savings vs. Enom not impressive. Most disturbingly, as reported by many people on these boards, GoDaddy recently "accidentally" emailed all the WildWest resellers's customers advertising GoDaddy's products! They tried to make amends with some compensation for resellers, but then did a (actually clever and tricky business-wise) trick of saying "oh but we didn't email everyone, we caught it partway through! So we rule! And we don't have to compensate you that much!". Also I phoned them for info and they were SUPER SUPER high pressure sales-wise on the phone.

3. Directi - look pretty good! To be honest, I thought I had some problem that was stopping me from just going with them, but now I can't figure out what it was.

4. Onlinenic - they seem pretty good, but someone mentioned they were based in China, and they do have at least sort of questionable worded phrase on their homepage, which isn't that bad, but sort of makes me wonder if they'll be easy to communicate with when problems arise (or any other time). I have enough hassles getting my web hosts to understand things that need to be done sometimes, and they're american. I'm very sensitive about bad communications when it comes to internet-based suppliers.

5. Opensrs - Do they really charge more than $10 for domains? To RESELLERS? That's what my look through their site seemed to say.. That's sort of wild and uncompetitive, am I right? Does anyone at all use them other than large companies who have special deals with them??


So I don't know, I guess I'm wondering what I'm missing since my cursory look show that the 2 highest profile registrars I am looking at (Enom, Wild West and Opensrs) seem to have fairly big problems compared to onlinenic and directi. I guess I just want more meaty info than the "use enom. or directi" posts I see so often.

I wish I had the time to give your post the response it needs. Almost two years ago, I was trying to choose between reseller plans myself. So I will simply tell you why I choose eNom almost by process of elimination:

WildWestDomains - First of all, I don't like the idea of paying $99.00 a year for the right to have wholesale pricing. But, as you mentioned, the 25% profit sharing thing killed it for me. Plus, I've never liked GoDaddy/WWD's websites. They remind me of a carnival barker trying to constantly distract you and sell you something else while you are trying to simply checkout. Finally, that whole fiasco when GoDaddy merged a couple of databases and people's domains were showing up in other people's account was just a mess.

OnlineNIC - I spent a lot of time trying to get their API to work for me. Their online support was horrible AT THE TIME, although I've heard that it has improved. I've also heard that the API is much improved from when I tried them. At the time, though I made a lot of calls to that one telephone number they had in the San Francisco area, and I ALWAYS got the same guy. He was polite and tried to be helpful, but English was definitely not his primary language. I gave up.

Directi - Now Directi was promising. When I signed up, I think I was reseller number 193 or something like that. Support was reasonably good by email, but reliability was a major issue. You can't sell domains if your site is down. And, boy, Directi was down a lot! They were having both software and hardware problems AT THE TIME. I have heard that reliability is better and that they have worked through most of their software issues. Their pricing was good (although you pay for little items like URL forwarding, etc.), and the whole idea of them being in India worried me a little because at the time the tension with Pakistan was escalating. I really liked Directi and if they have solved the reliability issues and software glitches then they might be a good choice for you.

OPENSRS - They have a very stable and reliable system with great support... but a $10.00 wholesale price is no longer competitive in my opinion.

ENOM - eNom is NOT perfect. But it's darn close for my needs. They have a very stable and reliable system. Their domains include all these bells and whistles that customers like to get FREE. Free email forwarding, free url redirection, free dynamic DNS, and even that free map thing. Customers love the word "FREE" even though they will probably never use it. I am not an ETP, but support has been good for me because I have a reasonably good ETP above me and on those rare occasions when I've gone directly to eNom, I've received very good support (although some people say they will just tell you to go to your ETP, they've never done that to me... yet). Now as far as price is concerned... you're right, $8.95 is not the best price. But there are several sources like www.NameZoom.net and www.DomainResell.biz which both use a rebate system to lower the price. And once you get to 1,000 domains in your account, you can petition eNom for ETP status at $6.95 pricing.

Awesome, thanks for the tips, those are very helpful. The more I think about it, the more I do tend to think Enom could be an option, I mean, if price is their only problem, that's not the worst thing ever I guess. I think I'm turned off by all these levels of resellers too, like, I don't really WANT to be a reseller of a reseller, but I guess if it saves me money and I can switch to be an ETP or whatever they call it later...


Anyone else?

Just an update, I've signed up with directi, they do seem the best choice for now, we'll see I guess, but look good so far!

Please keep us up to date with your Directi experience and good luck with your venture. ;)

Originally posted by me_loves_www
Just an update, I've signed up with directi, they do seem the best choice for now, we'll see I guess, but look good so far!

Good, you made a great choice. Let us know a few months from now on your experiences.

I wonder if i am one of the reseller under namezoom.net/name123.com or domainresell.biz, when i creat a customer or reseller under me, and i can log into their account by clicking the link inside the list of the re-seller account, so i can peer their all informations including the credit card options. that is a big secutiry problem.
And the things which i am feeling unsure is whether my reseller account under ETP (namezoom/name123/domainresell) can easly peer by their administrator?

All resellers can login to their following customer/reseller accounts and there are certain points to keep in mind because it is quite panicky.

1. Only customer accounts can be completely viewed but still you cannot view customers credit card details at least not the 14-16 digit number. You are granted access to customer account so you can perform maintenance for example in a case customer forgot their password which is most likely to happen in a retail account rather than a reseller account.

2. Reseller accounts are the safest and the above reseller cannot view the 'my info' page for reseller accounts. You are only allowed to view certain parts of following reseller account and are immediately restricted when trying to make any changes.

Thanks for reply, I am a newbie here, you are very nice
mdadnan

wow, it's very high security risk be a customer under a eNom reseller or a eNom ETP, our account will be hijack easily when we got a good name under the customer account.Because the eNom reseller can be very easily change our password,so we lost the accout and all name belong to that account.... High Risk.

emsbuy, this is the potential working model of Enom and reseller/retail account signups under them. Considering yourself as a retail account losing domain you can contact Enom and claim your domain back as Enom keeps track of all records and domain pushes under them.

Even this is not a very downside of Enom as I haven't seen many cases of reseller taking over clients domain. Big domain resellers under Enom such as Registerfly and NameCheap actually register domains in their accounts and not below them using the Enom API model. This puts client domains at the highest risk you can imagine but that hasn't changed anything. Clients still love to register NameCheap and registerfly due to credibility of their services and support. The same is practiced by rest of the Enom resellers.

Thanks for your patience, mdadnan, I got the point, and i am going to running the domain business. Cheers