Frank Schilling just rolled out Version 1 of his long anticipated registrar under Uniregistry as it went live today.
Uniregistrar.com is the name of the registrar but its located at Uniregisty.com.
The registrar which was obviously built for the new gTLD’s, or as Frank like to call them the new G’, is a bare bone’s registrar.
Its not glamorous in design and doesn’t offer a lot (or any) up-sells at the moment by design.
We got any early preview of the registrar and had a chance to chat with Frank over the last couple of days and here is our review of the registrar:
The Good:
Pricing
For new gTLD’s domain name registrations Uniregistry.com is cheaper than Godaddy.com which currently has 35% of the new gTLD market.
If you want to register a domain in the most popular new gTLD extension .Guru it will cost you (rack rate) at Godaddy.com $39.99.
At Uniregistry it will cost you $29.99 for the same domain.
A savings of about 30%.
.Photography, the 2nd most popular new gTLD (now the 3rd after .Berlin which is not available now on Uniregistry.com) will set you back $24.99 for a registration at Godaddy.
At Uniregistry.com the price is for a .Photography domain name is $19.99 a nice 20% savings.
A domain registration under .Diamonds will cost you $69.99 at Godaddy but only $49.99 at Uniregistry.com
The saving are pretty much across the board compared to Godaddy but it should be noted that Godaddy is one of the most expensive registrars for new gTLD domains.
If your curious for Uniregistry extensions, .Sexy is priced at $19.88 compared to the rack rate of $22.98 at Uniregistry’s top domain registrar at the moment Enom and .Tattoo is priced at $29.88 at Uniregistrar compared to $31.99 at Enom.
Free Privacy
Uniregistry is not charging anything for Privacy.
Matter of fact the default registration is to register domains under privacy.
I personally don’t use Privacy but many registrars are making millions if not tens or hundreds of millions charging people extra for privacy so that is a huge advantage for those that use privacy.
For those that don’t you will have to select public registration if you don’t want it to be private at the moment each time you register a domain or group of domains.
Gmail Integration
According to Uniregistrar Uniregistrar has an instant gmail integration feature, which will “Instantly get the email for any domain you own, and manage it immediately through Gmail for no extra charge.
Social Media Forwarding
Uniregistrar is offering free domain name forwarding to “your Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and LinkedIn, or to another domain name”.
The Bad
No Pre-orders
You cannot pre-order or pre-register a domain on a soon to be released new gTLD domain extension including domain extensions owned by Frank Schilling sister company Uniregistry.com
You can’t for example put in a pre-order, for a .photo a .pics or a .link new gTLD domain, which are in the next batch of new gTLD’s that will go live on Uniregistry.
You can go to several registrars and pre-order a .pics domain name, for example, 101domain.com is taking pre-orders for a .pics domain for $19.99 but on Uniregistrar you cannot pre-order or pre-register the domain.
So a pre-order at another registrar could well get processed before an attempted registration on Uniregistrar.com once the extension is live
No Early Access Program For Donuts and Rightside domains.
If you want to get use the early access program to acquire any of Donuts or Rightside registry domains you won’t be able to order them on Uniregistrar.
Uniregistrar is not taking the Early Access Program (EAP) hat Donuts and Rightside are offering.
No Premium Domains
Another thing you won’t be able to do on Uniregistrar.com is register any “premium new gTLD domains”
Domain names that have been designed by the relevant registry as a premium domain with premium domain pricing are not available to be registered on Uniregistry.com.
Take the domain name X.Singles which is currently available for registration on Godaddy for $1,499.00.
That domain, X.Singles cannot be registered on Uniregistry.com.
Many domains of Donuts, Rightside Minds + Machines that are available to be registered on a premium annual basis are not being carried by Uniregistry at least right now.
Uniregistry is grouping some new gTLD’s into categories rather than individually.
If you want to search only a particular new gTLD extension it maybe grouped with other domains.
If you want a .Guru domain you will have to find it on the drop down menu with the group they assigned it to, which is not alphabetical, so you may have to hunt and peck around if you are looking to search for just one particular extension, especially as hundreds get added, although I suspect most will search for all extensions at once, which works perfectly fine.
In the long run I’m sure that Frank’s Uniregistry will gain a relevant market share.
Remember This is only V1 and there is more to come in short order.
Best of luck to Mr. Schilling and his team.
Thanks sincerely for the very fair review Mike. It took me 13 years of experience and a 7 man team the better part of a year to build this rar.
Couple of quick points. In terms of functionality this is NOT a bare bones registrar. It does everything you would want including making transfers (epp) or push between accounts, and deletes. There is a great deal of additional functionality that will really blow people’s hair back once they get names in there and start using it. It was really designed for larger portfolio holders in the hundreds or thousands of names and for mom and pops to be easy to use.
I liken it to the iPhone. It’s beautiful, feature filled, elegant, solid and the technology has all been written in the last year.
I’m sorry it took so long to come out but we wanted it to be very good. We have additional releases coming in about 10 days that are equally impressive and then an additional suite of services for the rar in about a month.
This is a game changing registrar. Try it and you’ll see what I mean.
Really like the instant availability results across all TLDs. Miss few old good ones, like .me.
“This is a game changing registrar. Try it and you’ll see what I mean.”
Do you have list of things it’s doing that’s not being done by other registrars right now? Like, what reasons would people have to switch? Also, where are the prices? Most registrars have them on the home page or easy access from home page, I see nothing unless I’m missing it. I just see – “We plan to maintain fair, non-preferential pricing practices that fully embody our culture of service.” But that tells people nothing.
Thanks.
Had to add, went to uniregistry.com, clicked some links and for some reason took me to another extension, .link.
Thanks guys we will be supporting popular CC TLDs and relevant new G’s. It will be a week for info biz and a few others .. We will support other large established CC’s (we have passed membership on .de and are finalizing .ca and plan to support .fr .it .nl .co etc.. We will not be supporting premium priced new G’s or pre-registrations in our direct registration path because of our inability to deliver success for our users. Cindy, why don’t you try it and you can tell me what’s different – I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised : )
Nice design, good usability
“Cindy, why don’t you try it and you can tell me what’s different”
So far, no prices, bouncing between 2 different extensions. Those aren’t good things.
Had to add a .com to the cart to see the price, it’s higher than GoDaddy and probably some others.
The onus is on you since you said:
“This is a game changing registrar.”
There must have been a reason why you said it, something that would set you apart from the many registrars out there, a reason to switch registrars.
One, I couldn’t use Safari. I realize it’s not the top browser but there are probably other users. Tlds in right box don’t show in Safari. Two, great integration of name for sale at DNS if not available at registration prices. And finally,everyone thinks they are a game changer. Most overused startup word on the Net. It’s the users that determine if it’s true. I think long term it will be
Frank
What I meant by Barebones is that the site itself isn’t glamorous I don’t know what the functionality of it is or is not, I haven’t registered any domains with you or transferred domains to you or pushed domains.
Look forward to V2
I know its not easy or cheap to roll it out
Is there any customer support? I can’t find a phone number anywhere.
To gain customers dot com prices have to be cheaper than 13 bucks. Give them away at cost to build up a customer base in the beginning. At least get to Godaddy’s level of $9.99 for returning customers.
Godaddy, Name, NameBright, Enom etc……there is a lot of competition in this space and all of these have very detailed features that I don’t see with Uniregistry.
If another registrar sells one of Uniregistry’s names cheaper than Uniregistry themselves then it’s a no brainer to go with the other registrar because you have a lot more features and probably a lot more customer support. From what I can see already I would buy one of Uniregistry’s own extensions from Enom before I would buy it from Uniregistry even if it cost me a little more. Unfortunately that doesn’t say much for it at the moment. Simplicity in design is great but to remove or not create features to keep it simple is backwards thinking.
If you can’t be the absolute best and cheapest with your own extensions then I don’t see how this can be successful. You have to do it better and cheaper than everyone else especially being the brand new player in the game. Will be interesting to see going forward.
We are all fans of Frank and only wish him the best.
Actually my very first thoughts were:
‘This is gorgeous – this is where I’ll be living now’.
Like an architect designed house, some will immediately love it & understand the builders can attend to minor details later. Nice work.
Free privacy is a smart move and to be direct about it being standard for all from the start, it’s a classy move. I’m going to register something with them tomorrow, just not what gtld to hand reg. Congrats to Frank and his team.
@Cindy: You clicked on the company link and navigated to uniregistry.link, which is the parent company and the registry operator for .link. We’re proudly using our own TLD for our corporate website.
@Shane: We are a 100% Mac shop and use Safari everyday. You can either search for a specific TLD in the left box or tab over to the right box and a list of TLD options will populate. It definitely works in Safari.
@todd: we do have customer support, live during business hours (phone number is on info page off bottom footer), and we expect to expand those times as we grow.
I wish Frank luck with this endeavor because he is going to need another revenue source to offset his new tld losses.
Uniregistry DOES work fine in Safari. I forgot I was in private browsing mode and wasn’t accepting cookies. That or they have fixed it since I went in last. Either way, works perfectly
It is a “bare bones” registry with a lot of good features being talked about. I agree with Cindy and the others who say it is lacking more than it is offering. I see the vision laid out very clearly, but no meat. Good luck Frank.
I had a couple questions for Uniregistry so I waited until Grand Cayman operating hours (UTC time). Answering machine answered the phone and said I was number 9 in the que and within 5 minutes I was number 1 in the que and said that’s not a long wait but 51 minutes 39 seconds later and still nobody takes my call. Yes almost 1 hour. I sent the screenshot of my phone to Michael so he knows it’s not Bullshit.
@Todd: We are trying to understand what happened with your call. I just tried, selected options for general inquiries and technical support, and I had someone pick up on first ring. Can you send me details? bret @ nic – dot – sexy. Email support also has a very short turnaround, so we want to both answer your question and understand why you weren’t able to reach us.
@Bret
I was able to find the answers to my questions once I logged in to my account. Not sure why I would have to create an account to find answers to my questions but I understand this will be an ever evolving process in the beginning.
As for the details of the phone call they are listed above.
***BEWARE OF UNIREGISTRY PHONE NUMBERS***
Here are the Uniregistry phone numbers below.
Phone: 345-749-6263 (NAME)
Fax: 345-746-6263 (NAME)
Yes they look like your typical U.S. area code phone number but they are not. Uniregistry is based in the Cayman Islands and these are international phone numbers. I called to speak with Uniregistry a few weeks ago and was charged a whopping $98.34 for the phone call.
Get an 800 number Uniregistry. Ridiculous!!!!!
Still no pre-orders?