I'm switching domain registrars again. In all honesty the fact that you can read this probably means it works, but I guess maybe part of it could work but not other parts. At any rate, if you see anything odd drop me a line. There's a contact box at the right, down at the bottom of the sidebar.
For the curious/technically inclined I switched to Hover. I was reasonably happy with EasyDNS but there were a few things that bugged me, in order from most to least aggravating:
No privacy options. I don't think I've ever been contacted via my WHOIS info but there's no real reason to have that hanging around out there. EasyDNS has help pages that seem to say this isn't possible but that's just patently false. Yes, a contact must be listed. But it doesn't need to be me and there are plenty of registrars in the sea that will do this. It's free at Hover and in fact is defaulted to on.
Couldn't set the @ A record for hiddenjester.com. I pretty much want everything for hiddenjester to dump into Squarespace except for mail, which goes to Fastmail.fm. Without the @ A record if you did a dig on hiddenjester.com you got back nothing. Hover will let me send that to Squarespace. This is one of those "does anybody really care" things, and the A record for hiddenjester.com covers 99% of the cases but still … it was weird that the option was not available.
EasyDNS got a little spammy about renewals. I received seven total emails from them about renewing, going all the way back to late July. That wasn't really a huge deal but it was slightly annoying. And it's poorly timed right? They start annoying me right when I can jump ship and go somewhere else?
The EasyDNS dashboard/configuration/whatever-you-want-to-call-it page is confusing to me. Some things are off my account, some things are managed in the domain, then when you get into the domain there are several little subpages, etc. It worked but in comparison when I log into Hover I get a screen listing my domains, click one, and there's a "Domain Details" name for setting the name servers and the WHOIS stuff, then there's a DNS tab that has all of the DNS records listed for easy tweaking. (There are other tabs, but ones I can safely ignore. The Easy DNS separation between "account" and "domain" was less clean to me.)
The thing is at the end of the day I don't need complicated DNS stuff, and I don't need fancy options. I don't want a lot of handholding, I just want to drop in, set the things that need to be set and then not worry about it until I need to renew. At that point I'd like one email about it, maybe a month or so out. If I don't mess with it, ideally it would just roll over and charge me another year. I liked EasyDNS overall, and they certainly were head and shoulders above a Network Solutions or a (shudder) GoDaddy, but it seemed like there were both more knobs than I wanted, and a few knobs I did really want that were missing. Luckily switching registrars is much easier than it was in the Dark Ages …