Hendrik Boom <hendrik@???> wrote:

> Know any domain registrars that don't mess with the user?

You could take a look at mythic-beasts.com or portfast.net

When I left my last place, I decided to move my domains away from them (as an employee I got "cost price" domains and free hosting) - knowing that the people left in charge are (staying polite) "ethics challenged" and "technically challenged". Good choice as it happened, because one "person" decided to just switch off* the remaining servers - "DNS will be OK, it's all mirrored at Portfast". I had mixed emotions when I heard that they'd been in a panic to setup about 100 remaining domains on their preferred hosting platform (with a truly horrible GUI for managing DNS) after a week when the secondary DNS servers expired all the records - a strong sense of schadenfreude as their own domain was one of them, but with my professional hat ot a distinct sense of anger that a) it had impacted clients, and b) they'd be told a bunch of lies as to why it had happened.
* Didn't just switch off, but switched off, and ripped out of the rack and all the networking ripped apart - so couldn't just switch it back on again.

Anyway, my personal domains are now mirrored at Portfast - they were before as we used them to mirror our primary (have a neat API to keep their list up to date with ours). And on a recommendation from someone in my local-ish LUG moved my registrations to Mythic Beasts. What I can say is that when we were setting up our secondary DNS service at Portfast, we had good support dealing with real people in technical roles - not support droids with a computer flowchart. We'd previously had a secondary service from another UK supplier (Gradwell) who'd decided to pull out of that side of things - and they arranged to transfer our service to an equivalent one with Portfast rather that the more typical approach of "we're turning your service off, bog off and find another service yourself".

And I see that I'm now down to around 5 years left on my domains - so time to extend that back up to 9+ years. Like you, I don't subscribe to the "year by year and leave it late" renewals policy. We had clients with domain name problems caused by that. Of course, the alternative problem is that you "know" there's a long time left and the years can roll by faster than you realise :-(

Simon