why I deliberately overpaid for my latest domain name

I’ve been a loyal customer of gandi.net for a while now…cheap, no-frills domain registration services (and other related services that I’ve never looked into).

Recently, I found out that godaddy.com was giving domain registrations away more cheaply (about $9/year, compared to gandi’s 12 Euros/year). So when it came time to register a domain for my mother’s travel agency site, I went with godaddy.

I’m not sure how many screens I had to click through, unchecking boxes that were opting me in to additional services I didn’t want, searching the screen to be sure that the button I was about to click on was the real “continue” button, and not one of many buttons upon which a click would actually indicate my agreement to purchase some other service. To tell you, I’d have to go through it all again.

The next day, a customer service from godaddy called me to welcome me to the company, and to ask if he could help me in any way. He was very polite, insofar as people with that kind of job can be polite and still get paid. Getting him to accept that the conversation was over without hanging up on him was not easy.

Anyway, the rest of the story is obvious. Today I registered another domain. I started to use godaddy again, but after a few minutes of unchecking boxes and double-checking the site navigation, I closed the window and registered the domain at gandi. It took less than two minutes.

I used to see gandi as a discount registrar, but I now see them as offering a premium service: the implicit agreement to leave me the hell alone and let me register my domains in peace.