Yahoo! Domain Registrar Review

I registered my first domain ever at Yahoo Domains because they were running a $5/year promotion at the time. I'm fairly pleased with the service. A lot of people used to HATE Yahoo! because they were horrible in the past. For instance, back then, they made it very hard to transfer domains and their web control panel was atrocious to use. However, they've revamped their domain service since then.

There's nothing about Yahoo Domains that sets them apart from the rest of the registrars, but it works just fine. What odd is that they outsource their domain registration to Melbourne IT, an Australian company. I've heard that Melbourne IT has a very good infrastructure though. And my domain works perfectly, so it's probably a solid company.

Like I said, one of my website's domains is currently registered with Yahoo, so lets take a look at their interface.

See. It's very simple. One flaw that I should point though, is their domain forwarding feature. You can either do a unmasked forward or a masked forward. A masked forward means that if someone goes to my .COM URL, it will forward them to my site and the target site's URL will show up in the address bar of the browser. ie, if someone goes to my .COM, http://registrarsite.blogspot.com/ will show up in their address bar.

A masked forward will retain the .COM URL in the user's address bar so that they cannot see that they have been forwarded.

The problem with Yahoo is that if you choose to use masked forwarding, they will put a Yahoo ad on your new page in a separate FRAME! Trust me, it looks REALLY ugly and I doubt anyone uses masked forwarding simply because the ad in the frame kills the look of your site.
Here's the most important page, the DNS control panel.

This is the page where you change the DNS servers.

It's pretty straightforward. However, they should have left the MX and CNAME records settings in a different page because most users will probably only change the Name Servers. In fact, to this day, I'm not even sure if my MX and CNAME entries are correct because I have no idea what they do!

PROS

• It's Yahoo!
• They run promotions very often. Infact, there was a $1.99/year registration deal a few weeks ago!

CONS

• Yahoo displays ads in a frame if you use masked forwarding.
• Nameserver adjustment page is a little complicated.