I currently ahve my hosting company as my registrar and am looking to move to a separate registrar. I have a mix of uk and .org domains, mainly .uk.

In picking a registrar, am I correct in saying the factors to consider are:
1) pick an established firm
2) decent support
3) decent control panel interface
4) preferably uk (so that they are familiar with the uk system, and in the same country as me).
4) cost (less important)

Would it also be true to say that their system redundancy etc is less important as, unless I'm making changes) it doesn't directly affect my site, assuming the name servers are provided by others?

I'm also about to move to a new hosting company with VPS. I can run two differant ip addresses for primary and secondary DNS off the same server, but I'm not sure thats the best of ideas, so may put DNS with the registrar. In selecting a DNS provide:
1) is it less important to keep this seperate from the website host, as the new name-server addresses can be set via the registrant?
2) unless IP addresses are changed, is DNS server reliability/redundancy important or does the nature of DNS mean that the system is resilient even if your name server is temporarily down.
3) Does server performance/network performance/location make a differance?

The only other factors to consider for DNS provision are (i assume)
1) support
2) decent control panel interface
3) dynamic updateing (if required)
4) cost (less important)

Any advice much appreciated.

Thanks

Nathan

Established and good support are two good places to start. I wouldn't put toooo much emphasis on their intuitiveness of their control panel because in all reality you won't be changing your nameservers every day. All you need is the functionality.

I would also definitely get a registrar in the same location as your main ccTLD's (ie the UK in your situation).

Having your two nameservers on the same machine is definitely not a good idea. If the machine goes down your domain won't resolve, and more importantly any mail to your domain will be lost. Even if the machine goes down and the hostname still resolves (if you use external DNS), your mail will at least still be held in the queue for delivery later.

One option for extra redundancy is to use your registrar's nameservers AND your own nameservers. That way you get the best of both worlds. Just make sure all the records match. The ideal way of doing this would be to make your own vps a slave to the registrar's dns servers... but I don't know of many registrar's that allow/support this.

You could also use your own nameservers and use something like everydns for slave servers... that way you get complete control and redundancy.

Thanks for the advice. Looking at registrars, I assume I'm best to pick one who is both a Nominet registrar, and ICANN acredited. otherwise they will be at the end of who knows how long a chain?

Bingo. Not to say that resellers necessarily do a bad job, but an accredited registrar has a certain implicit reputation behind them as getting accredited is usually quite a hefty process (I know it is here in Canada). Not to mention accredited registrars will also have access to the cheapest prices.

Bear in mind you could use more than one registrar... ie a nominet one for your .co.uk's and an ICANN one for your .org's...

If price is not your main criteria, then by all means select the best based on what kind of services they provide particularly on whether they assign personal account manager (if you have large number of domains) and what kind of products they offer.