| Yahoo! Prices | Pros | Cons | |
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| Current Promotion | |||
| .com: $9.95 .net: $9.95 .org: $9.95 .biz: $9.95 .info: $9.95 .us: $9.95 Transfers: $9.95 |
New customers receive their first domain for $1.99 Free domain name forwarding and masking Free domain name with any hosting package Free "catch-all" mailbox Free customizable domain parking page 24/7 toll-free, customer support Yahoo! is one of the largest and most financially secure domain registration services |
Yahoo! is not an ICANN accredited registrar; it resells domains registered by Melbourne IT Yahoo! is notorious for making it difficult to transfer domains to another registrar Yahoo! automatically charges users a month ahead of time for upcoming registration fees Yahoo! has one of the worst domain control panels of all of the popular registration services WHOIS privacy costs $9.00 Yahoo! does not accept incoming transfers |
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Name Yahoo! Inc. Web Site www.yahoo.com Founded Santa Clara, California 1995 Country USA Email Support domains- support@yahoo- inc.com Phone Support (800)318-0783 Visit Yahoo! |
Summary According to PC Magazine, "domain registration through Yahoo! Small Business is the easiest." The author of this article should have done more research. Yahoo! is a decent registration service, if you are new to the domaining world and solely plan to manage one or two domains (the $1.99 price tag for the first year on your initial domain is a nice incentive). However, even in this case, we would suggest that you register your domain through GoDaddy, which has a similar deal. Yahoo! offers discount prices and above average, toll-free phone support. Yahoo! is the single most frustrating "registrar" with which we have ever dealt for a couple reasons (we put registar in quotes, in this case, because Yahoo! is not actually an ICANN accredited domain registrar; it resells domains registered by Melbourne IT). Importantly, Yahoo's control panel is extremely difficult to navigate and lacks bulk management tools, which makes it extremely difficult to manage more than a few domains. Additionally, Yahoo! does not accept incoming transfer requests and makes it very difficult to transfer domains to another registrar. Services Through Yahoo! Domains, you can register the following TLDs: .com, .net, .org, .biz, .info and .us. Each TLD costs $9.95, which puts Yahoo! Small Business directly in the middle of the pack with respect to pricing. Yahoo! does offer new users their first domain for $1.99, but it will renew at the standard $9.95 fee. Yahoo! has one of the worst domain control panels of all of the popular domain name registration services. The first domain that we ever registered for Gametld.com was at Yahoo! (in 2001); they use the same basic domain control interface today that they did then. It lacks any bulk management tools, which makes it extremely frustrating to manage a domain portfolio of any size through them. We had 25 or so domains with Yahoo! a few years back. Updating name servers and so forth was a hair-pulling experience. Yahoo! offers a reasonably attractive set of free features for domain holders: domain forwarding, a cutomizable parking page with an ok site builder and a strong domain locking feature; however, Yahoo! domain holders will have to pay an additional $9.00 per year for WHOIS privacy and a whopping $22.95 per month for a mailbox. Size Yahoo! does not release statistics related to how many domains have been registered through it or how many it hosts, but Yahoo! is without question, one of the largest registration services globally. Although it is not an ICANN accredited registrar, we do not think that users should be concerned about the security of their domains. Melbourne IT, the registrar for which Yahoo! resells domains, is a very large and financially secure registrar in its own right. Customer Support Customer support is reasonably good at Yahoo!. Yahoo offers 24/7 toll-free support, and the technicians tend to be very knowledgeable. Frankly, Yahoo's support would be terrific; however, the company has one of the most unfriendly terms and conditions of registration of any popular registrar. Yahoo does not accept incoming transfer requests, and it makes it extremely difficult to transfer domains away from Yahoo! For instance, Yahoo! charges users automatically for upcoming domain registrations a month in advance of the registration date. In this manner, many customers complain that they would have transferred the domain elsewhere, but end up having to stick with Yahoo!, because theyhave already paid a fee to Yahoo! before they would ever think to transfer the domain. Room for Improvement (1) It is difficult to pick out a couple things that Yahoo! could do better, because their domain business needs to improve across the board: Yahoo! should upgrade its domain name control panel (currently, the panel is extremely cumbersome and makes it impossible to manage a large domain properly), improve the transfer process (stop trying to prevent users from leaving after they become frustrated with the antiquated control panel) and lower its prices ($9.95 for a .info domain- that is not even close to market price!). (2) Yahoo! is the largest Internet company in the world by page views, and yet, it is not an ICANN accredited registrar. We know of ICANN accredited registrars run by less than three people. Last year, Google decided to enter the domain business and immediately became an accredited registrar. Stop reselling domains for an IT company on literally the polar opposite side of the world! Fill out the paperwork and become an accredited registrar! The inefficiencies created by this arrangement lead to frustratng experiences for customers. A few times we had to call Yahoo! about a problem with our billing and were referred to Melbourne IT. We ended up spending more on the long distance calls, then we saved on the billing discrepancy. |
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