As the title says, domain name offer by Yahoo! has been extended to 31st December 2005. There was a short section on this offer in one of the older posts but I have since used the scheme to purchase 2 domain names. So I suppose its time for an update to do Yahoo! Domains justice.
Yahoo! Domains allows its customers to register popular domain name extensions (most important of which is .com). Actually, Yahoo! Domains is just a front. Your domain name is actually registered by Melbourne IT, an I-CANN accredited registrar and Yahoo!’s current partner in the domain name business.
The offer: USD 2.99 per domain name per year
That’s about as cheap as its going to get. Subscriptions can be made for 1 year, 2 years, 3 years or 5 years. The service is auto-renewed 1 month before the actual expiry of your package so you might like to keep an eye on that in case you don’t want it to be renewed or you wish to transfer to a different registrar.
At the offered price, a 3 year subscription comes up to USD 8.97. That is only slightly more expensive than Namecheap.com’s USD 8.88 offer for a single year. You get 3 years for the price of 1! Even if you have an idea for a site but don’t yet have the time to design and compose it, you might like to use Yahoo! domain name services to park that ideal domain name before someone steals it.
Interface wise, Yahoo! domain’s control panel leaves much to be desired. It consists of a main page listing all the domain names that you have registered. You can zoom into a particular domain which will then give you the control panel for that domain. The sidebar still shows you your other domains and you can switch between them with a simple mouse click. However, there is no easy access menu for the control panel options (e.g. the quick links to the options in the sidebar!). That means that once you follow a link in the control panel, you have to go back to the control panel’s main page to access any other functions. Talk about redundant mouse clicks and pageloads.
The lack of quicklinks aside, the control panel does give you considerable control over the administration of your domain name. You can edit your Whois profile, change your DNS settings, perform site forwarding and lock/unlock your domain. This last one is particularly important should you desire to transfer your domain to a different registrar. The ability to change the DNS settings means that you don’t have to rent webspace with Yahoo. You can rent space else where and simply point the DNS to your host server.
I don’t know how reliable the registrar is since the domains I have purchased are not active. However, I would dare say that it should be reasonable enough for Yahoo! to use their service.
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