Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Running a Web Hosting Business : Partnering with domain registar?

[Jason Ellis]

Hi All!

I have a question for other hosting companies out there. For the last 3 years we've been partnered with Register.com for co-branded domain registration. For about 2/3 of that time we haven't been at all happy with their services, but because of a (foolish) mistake on my part we were locked into a contract.

Well, that contract is up this month (yay!!!), so I'm looking for another domain registrar to partner with for co-branded domain registrations.

I had thoughts of working with OpenSRS, but decided that their system (while probably the most profitable) was too high-maintenance for our needs. I had looked (and in fact signed up with) Dotster, but their interface needs a *lot* of work and they have made a few changes to their service recently that makes me wary of using them.

Does anyone here know of any other companies that do co-branded registration? What I'm really looking for is something that we can send customers to a special URL (for example, our Register.com co-brand page is at http://hostingsolutions.register.com/) that will do two things - it'll let the registrar know that they are our customer, and any domains registered through that URL will have our DNS servers automatically assigned to them.

I'm not looking to make a lot of money of this (although a little money would be great) - my main goal is to have a fast, easy, efficient, and inexpensive way for my customers to register domain names, without requiring me to be come a domain registrar (or pseudo-registrar like we would have to do with OpenSRS) or maintain a lot of script mumbo-jumbo on our servers. I also don't want to deal with the money - I want the customers to pay the registrar directly for this, which we also couldn't do through OpenSRS.

So - anyone out there working with any domain registrars that do this? I would really appreciate any feedback you have about it. I don't want to be using Register.com for even one millisecond longer than our contract requires.

Thanks,

Jason

[Dollac]

A cheap one (or what I think is a cheap one) is Go Daddy . Some concerns/points of interest are.

(a) Forms are customible but not that much.
(b) $99.00 annual fee
(c) Your cost is $0.25 off of listed prices (ie. 1 year is listed at $8.95 so your cost is $8.70)
(d) You are responsible for the CC fee but they handle the processing they just charge you the processing fee.

So there it is in a nut shall. I will do some figures for ya just because I have nothing much to do right now. Based on registering 8 domains per month (96 per year).

Annual Fee: $99.00
Your Cost for Domains (all 1 year term): $835.20
Total Cost: $934.20 ($9.74 per domain)

Your charge per domain: $9.99
Processing Fee (@2.3%): $0.23
Your cost per domain: $9.74

Whopping Revenue of: $0.02

I know of another one that is similiar (if I remeber correctly) that your cost in the $6.90 per domain range, but you have to purchase 1,000 balance (balance = 1 domain at 1 year) and they expire after 1 year so if you do not use them you lose your money. Next time I am bored I will search for the site again and post it here.

[winquest]

You may want to try http://www.stargateinc.com. Unfortunately, their API only supports ASP scripting. You pay uS$8.00 per domain and requires you to purchase 20 domains + setup fee outfront.

[nelson]

I use http://itsyourdomain.com . They are not the cheapest at $14.99 per year, but you can make it look like your own. They were also very easy to set up. You charge whatever you like, and nameserver info will go in according to what you set it as. You may look at my site for an example.

[IntraHost]

<<MOD EDIT: You know better!>>

[Brad]

How do you provide their service cheaper then they do?

<<MOD EDIT: Removed the quoted post above>>

[SoftWareRevue]

Originally posted by winquest
You may want to try http://www.stargateinc.com. Unfortunately, their API only supports ASP scripting. You pay uS$8.00 per domain and requires you to purchase 20 domains + setup fee outfront.

Hard to beat Stargateinc's pricing plan

[Brad]

I couldn't find this plan today?

I'll go look again..

Originally posted by AnIdiot


Hard to beat Stargateinc's pricing plan

[Brad]

The hardest part of all of this seems to be keeping the users from having to go through 2-seperate order forms, (1-form for domain registration then on to the next for hosting) while allowing full automation on the host side.

It would be nice to have one order form for both without having to manually enter in all their information later for the domain registration part. Not sure if there is a way around this.

Anyone doing this?

[IntraHost]

<<EDIT>>

[Brad]

Stargate received our vote ..

I went with Staregateinc.com for their cheap prices and the Windows Com object they send to bulk accounts.

I'm now making a Windows program to pull in all webhosting orders into a database through email. With the Com object all domain orders detected can be processed at the touch of a button without any typing, direct to Stargate. Should work cool!

Now on to programming it!

[SoftWareRevue]

Originally posted by Brad
Stargate received our vote ..

I went with Staregateinc.com for their cheap prices and the Windows Com object they send to bulk accounts.

I'm now making a Windows program to pull in all webhosting orders into a database through email. With the Com object all domain orders detected can be processed at the touch of a button without any typing, direct to Stargate. Should work cool!

Now on to programming it!

Let me know when you get that figured out

I'm terrible at programming

[Brad]

Actually, I made a quick windows program last night that could register and check domain availability by filling in the fields and clicking the button.

The problem I realized later was how to give users access to a control panel on our site without ASP? Ya see, Stargareinc gives ya the ability to have your own control panel access from your own site but you have to have ASP with COM Objects support. That was not written clearly on their site. I've mailed them twice today for a solution but no response as of yet.

So, I guess the only way to work it out, is to give users the stargateinc link to login to their domain account, then we have to deal with price differences and such, not good.

Not sure what were going to do now ..

Originally posted by AnIdiot


Let me know when you get that figured out

I'm terrible at programming