Some general rules
Don’t buy domains on behalf of your clients.
Clients should ALWAYS own the domain. It can be tempting to offer this for less—ahem—technically-inclined clients or if you are in a rush, but it always causes problems in the long run.
Don’t buy from a hosting company.
If your clients buy a domain through SiteGround or Bluehost, it can get messy to inevitably untangle domain and hosting in the future or cause more downtime given the same service provider.
Ensure that the domain registrar has delegate or collaborator access.
The most ideal set up for clients includes separate providers for:
- Domain registrar
- DNS/nameservers (CloudFlare preferred)
- Website hosting (host with Valerian! 😉)
- Email (Google Workspace or other service client already uses)
Separating service providers ensures that if one service is down, others can potentially still operate without impacting others and allows us to switch service providers much easier if necessary.
So, which domain registrars do we recommend?
CloudFlare (our top choice)
“But you just said to keep domain registrar and DNS separate!” Yes, we did, but CloudFlare gets an exception. 😅
While they started out as a DNS provider, CloudFlare now offers domain registration at wholesale prices without a markup. This makes them the most cost-effective choice for your clients.
Added perk: it’s one less account the client has to keep track of, since we’ll need a CloudFlare account for DNS anyway.
Namecheap (our second choice)
If a client would prefer not to have everything at CloudFlare or is already using Namecheap, it’s a great option.
Namecheap’s shared access and reasonable pricing is a win in our books. We do find that they take a little longer to propagate, but once nameservers are at CloudFlare, this isn’t an issue.
Options we can work with
GoDaddy
We don’t recommend GoDaddy, but since they offer delegate access and are a popular registrar, we can make it work.
Google Domains/Squarespace
We used to love Google Domains, but since the sale to Squarespace, it hasn’t been the best. We can still use them since they offer shared access.
Other registrars
If a registrar offers delegate or shared access then we can likely work with them. If they do not offer this, we highly recommend having the client register with another provider or transfer their domain to a new registrar that supports this. It makes everyone’s life easier, we promise. 😅