The best domain registries in Ireland

When you register your domain there are a few things to consider

Before you register your domain name, do a little research. Or, in the alternative, keep reading and read about some of our experiences working with different domain registries, here in Ireland.

Our team has worked with a number of different domain registration companies, over the years. Where your website's domain is hosted can make your life very easy or very difficult. It really depends on how much functionality you are looking for, and more importantly, whether you will be managing the domain yourself, or allowing your web developers to manage the domain, on you behalf.

By far, the two best domain registration companies we have worked with over the years are Blacknight.com and Register365.com. There are a lot of factors to think about when registering your domain name. If you intend to manage your domain yourself, without professional help, you need to very well-informed about where to register. 

The top three factors we have looked at are as follows:

1. Pricing and special offers
2. Customer service and technical support
3. Features and ease-of-use

For the sake of brevity, we're just going to focus on these two registries, to analyse them under these three headings. There are plenty of others like GoDaddy (largely aimed at the US market), LetsHost, MyHost, and others. Reg365 and Blacknight stand out to us because they strike a good balance between value and usability.

Pricing and special offers

The two most common top-level domains in Ireland are .com and .ie, .ie domains are specific to Ireland and you have to have a connection with the country in order to register one (live here, be a citizen, run a business/charity etc). Typically, .ie domains retail at twice that of .com domains. 

Both Blacknight and Register365 are currently running special offers on .ie domain registrations.

The two companies allow you to register a .ie for the special offer price of €5.99 (plus VAT), for the first year. Thereafter, Blacknight's pricing increases to €24.99 (plus VAT) and Register365's price goes up to €24.95 (plus VAT), per annum. 

Now, here is the main difference between the two companies:

• Register365 allow you to register only one .ie, at the special offer rate, per account; with all subsequent domains being registered at the full price.
• Blacknight, on the other-hand, allow you to register as many .ie domains , as you like, at the special rate.

When is comes to .com domains, the two companies, again, have similar special offers. 

For .com domains, Blacknight have a special introductory price of €5.99 (plus VAT), for the first year; reverting to €13.95 (plus VAT) for subsequent years. While Register365 have a special offer of €4.99 (plus VAT), for the first year with the price going up to €14.95 (plus VAT) per annum, after the special offer rate runs-out.

Service and support

Blacknight are well-known for their customer service. The company really prides itself on delivering prompt tech support and billing resolutions. Last week, I had an issue with a few domains I'd registered with them, the live chat agent got me sorted in jig-time, and the billing team refunded me some money I had spent on a service I ended-up not needing, in a few hours. 

Likewise, Register365 are pretty on-the-ball, they have a very good ticketing system, which allows you to track issues with ease. I had to request an authorisation code to push a domain to a different account, recently, and they got it over to me, by email, with minimal red-tape, in less than a few hours. 

On the whole, both these companies have excellent customer service and technical support.

Features and ease-of-use

This is the area where the two companies diverge most significantly. Register365 is loaded with really easy to use features, and if you have no, or minimal, technical experience, it is the obvious choice.

For example, Reg365 allows you to set-up a catch-all email on any domains you have registered, which are all easy to find and manage in their nicely design control panel. The catch-all feature allows you to forward any mail that is directed at your domain (john@xyz.ie, Jon@xyz.ie etc) to a nominated email address, to ensure you don't miss mail due to misspellings, and the likes. Best of all, this feature is free.

Whereas, on Blacknight you have to either by an email hosting package (starting from about €12/year) or set-up your MX records to direct mail to an external email service, in any event, you cannot set-up a catch all, and both of these options will cost you more.

As for setting up DNS records (A name records, C name records, TXT records, MX records etc) Register365 comes out ahead, yet again. You can easily navigate to a domain name you have registered on the control panel, scroll down and find where to edit the DNS records, it is extremely intuitive. Unfortunately, Blacknight isn't quite as intuitive. 

Blacknight categorise domains into two categories: registered domains and hosted domains, there's a technical reason for this, but it is largely a superfluous feature in the modern-age. In order to manage a domain's DNS records, you have to naviagte to hosted domains, rather than registered domains, which could confuse even the more technically minded amoung us.

Then you've to determine the logic to find where the DNS records can be changed, and then you have to add one record at time, saving each time. Whereas on Reg365 you can update all your records on one screen, and save them all at once when you are finished. 

Register365 invested a lot of money in upgrading their user-interface a few years back, and Blacknight could do with a face-lift and some modernisation, on their control panel. 

Summary

From a purely financial perspective, if you are registering loads of domains and want to manage them all on one account, Register365 is the more expensive option, in the first year anyway. But if money is not object or you're only registering one domain name, we would have to recommend it from a user-interface perspective, if for no other reason. Plus, it has some extra features for free, which is always good.

Again, looking at the cost base, Blacknight is the only logical choice if you are looking to register multiple domain names, especially .ie domains; with a saving of €19 on each name. You'll have to learn how to manage the more technical interface, but if you know what you're doing it's pretty handy to use, and once you'll done it once, you can do it second and subsequent time. Plus, their really fast live chat support feature will talk you through any pitfalls.

Considering all this, you could always just contact us and we'd do all the donkey work for you!