My Experience With Indiatimes Domain Service [TDIS]

Seeing new blogs coming up everyday the writer inside me started nagging me to start my own blog. After giving it a lot of thought I finally started my journey with blogger.com. But having a blogspot.com attached to my url didn’t give that feeling of ownership. So just after a week I started looking for a custom domain. After doing a lot of research I came across a post by Rahul 8 Tips For Finding Good Domain Name. Using that as a buying guide I finally bought my first domain name from GoDaddy and started my blog KnowledgeHub. Believe me guys having your own domain name gives you an immense satisfaction and also motivates you to write regularly.

Last week I decided to add another blog to my network. Having helped my friends in buying and setting up their domains made me feel like a pro in the field of domain market, and thus I let my guard down. A big mistake.

After a lot of research, I finalized the domain I wanted. But just before hitting the buy button at GoDaddy, a “smart idea” struck me and I started looking for other cheap domain registrars. My (bad) luck, I came across Indiatimes. They were offering ‘dot in’ extension domains at half the price I was paying at GoDaddy. HALF THE PRICE !! Boy that’s lot of money !!  Without thinking further I logged out of GoDaddy and registered the domain with IndiaTimes. “HaHa, I’m a smart customer”, I told myself. A dumb statement.

Trouble started when I opened the dashboard to change dns settings, as required by blogspot. Guess what- no dns settings there !! 1 mail and 2 calls later I realized that they do not provide the Cname and A record entries access to customers, but they’ll “do the needful from their end, if I provide them the details”. Why can’t they give us the total dns control like GoDaddy ? :x. Well you can’t ask for everything at such cheap price , I tried to reason with myself. And at least they are making the changes so that’s fine.

But their next mail told me that nothing is fine. They required Google Unique String ‘which is needed for domain verification’ ! Now what’s that ! A quick call to their customer support team told me that I can get the unique string by googling about it. Boss, if someone can get their unique string just by googling it, then how can it be “unique” ? But with nothing else to do, I tried that as well. Google told me what it is, but no matter what search query I used I couldn’t find a way to get the unique string for the domain I bought. Baffled, I mailed them again, telling them that I was never asked for this string when I changed dns settings in GoDaddy, to which they replied that they will get back to me soon. I’m still to hear from them.

Its been five days since I bought the domain name and I’m yet to get the dns settings done :(. I am now considering to move my domain to GoDaddy, but after adding the transfer fees, the effective cost would come out to be more than what I would have initially paid. Looks like I wasn’t such a smart customer after all.

Lessons Learnt

1) Before buying a domain do complete research about the registrar. Ask experienced people about their opinion of different registrars.

2) Check if your registrar gives you total dns control or not.

Planning to buy a domain name ?

Before you go ahead, I recommend you to read these articles on Devils Workshop:

• 8 Tips For Finding Good Domain Names
• Some Tips To Follow Before Buying A Domain Name

You can buy your domain from GoDaddy. I have bought 3 domain names from them till now and have faced no issues. A suggestion though: You might want to change the renewal process from Auto to Manual, otherwise your credit card will be charged at the time of renewal without your consent. Or better still, use virtual credit card.