When you ask who is the best registrar, you have to have a view of what best means to you.
If you are a domain speculator who grabs 100 domains a week, you might want the lowest price that lets you transfer domains to other people hassle free.
If you are a corporate domain owner, you might be looking for someone who takes purchase orders or domain orders "on account."
If you are a paranoid about using a credit card online, or under age, you might want someone who takes checks or money orders.
If you are interested in a free Internet presence, you might want free web space or an email account with your domain.
If you are a "guru" on the Internet, the quality of the domain manager interface may not be as interesting to you than if you are new to the whole thing.
If you are afraid of resellers, you will never do business with OpenSRS - the #2 registrar at the moment. There may be some resellers to be afraid of (many in my book...), however the security of OpenSRS is not something to run away from.
OpenSRS does not sell direct to the public. They have decided to concentrate on the reseller model and have set very high standards of conduct both for themselves, and their reseller channel. They don't SPAM, don't support RSPs who SPAM, don't contact your customers directly, and will not market to them. They are the only registrar who would make these commitments to us.
We looked hard at all the programs out there, and though I'm not going to slam any of the competition - that's simply not my style - we decided on OpenSRS after careful consideration of all the variables.
We could have gone with alternate registrars in order to offer domains at a lower price, however we chose high integrity and stellar service over low price and are very pleased with our choice.
In the past 6 months we've only had domains tranfer away from us by speculators who picked up names in the various LandRush deals.
The huge growth that the sub-$10 registrars have experienced continues to be fueled by the domain speculation market. When these domains expire and drop in the next year, it will be interesting to see the results in the number of domains registered by each.
I am still predicting that the sub-$10s will not be sub-$10 by this time next year. They cannot survive at that level for long. We've done the business case analysis to become an ICANN registrar. It's simply not possible - the volume simply does not make up for the lack of profit.
-t
