Show HN: Badger.com is a brand new domain registrar (GoDaddy competitor)

https://www.badger.com/#register/hackernews

by badger_com • 15 years ago

11 18 15 years ago

badger.com

ceejayoz• 15 years ago

"How we're different" gives me a 404 JS alert.

edit: The GoDaddy SSL cert you're using is a little ironic.

stevelosh• 15 years ago

First link I clicked on, got a JS "404" popup, immediately closed the page.

badger_com4• 15 years ago

Oops, I had removed that link temporarily but forgot to push to production. We are working on getting our Knowledge Center and FAQs sections live and once that happens, the link will go back!

ernestipark• 15 years ago

A domain registrar's primary focus on the homepage should be a big form with the ability to type in domains and check their availability. It's not clear that search bar is to find domains. There should be TLDs at the end of the form to make it clear.

desireco42• 15 years ago

I appreciate your sentiment with this, and want to be supportive, but it takes more then landing page to be domain registrar. I think you should work on this some more before showing anything. See other comments on what to improve.

badger_com4• 15 years ago

We've been working on this non-stop for six months... it's not just a landing page. We are are a fully functional ICANN accredited registrar. We offer domain registration/transfers, DNS hosting, WHOIS privacy, email forwarding, url forwarding, etc.

pace2• 15 years ago

Don't get me wrong, but this is such an ignorant comment. Try it once and then you see why Badger is different (as I said before: the domain search is awesome).

seldo• 15 years ago

While I admire your enthusiasm, the last thing an experienced web developer wants is a "brand new" domain registrar. The primary aspect you want in your registrar is longevity, because transferring domains is a huge pain in the neck. GoDaddy gets business just by virtue of having been around for so long, thus indicating it's not going to be another disaster like RegisterFly.

Obviously everybody has to start somewhere, but if you're brand new, focus on increasing consumer confidence through things like service guarantees and offering long-term contracts.

badger_com4• 15 years ago

We have been using the term "brand new" as a way to show that we're trying to approach the domain industry a bit differently than our 5-10 year old competitors. I think the biggest example is that we've open sourced our javascript frontend (http://github.com/badger/frontend) which exclusively uses our API (http://badger.github.com/). We think the domain industry is ripe for disruption and we think we have the right team and ideas to execute.

As you pointed out though we don't have a proven track record. Unfortunately, there's not a lot we can do about that. Service guarantees and long-term contracts might seem nice on the surface but wouldn't really change much if we went out of business. I believe the quote goes something like: "The only two things guaranteed in life are death and taxes. (Benjamin Franklin)"

That said, we're a startup in San Francisco with an office and employees and have been around for over a year. We previously were a domain reseller (rhinonames.com) but have spent the last six months becoming ICANN accredited and building badger.com. We think we can build the best registrar around and we're here to stay.

pork• 15 years ago

That's very enthusiastic and I applaud it, but could you perhaps provide some more substance beyond an open source frontend. How can we use the API? What benefits do you think exposing an API would provide? What are the capabilities of your API, etc.?

mgkimsal• 15 years ago

good to see more competition. I agree with the other criticisms here, and would add there's nothing about pricing on the site anywhere I can find.

It seems badger is .com and .net only? promote that up front so I don't waste time.

I hope this wasn't put together solely as a "screw godaddy" anti-SOPA thing. I suspect it wasn't, as I'd imagine icann accreditation would take more than a few days, but the "godaddy competitor" in the title makes me think otherwise. Or maybe this is just good pr-timing?

caw2• 15 years ago

Original discussion here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3397810

Does HN find it acceptable to repost things like this? It's a slightly different format (link vs no link), but it seems rather quick to be reposting.

badger_com4• 15 years ago

I don't mean to offend or spam. We just removed the "invite-only" aspect about an hour ago and are now launching to the public. It seemed like a "Show HN" was appropriate.

ohashi• 15 years ago

Seems quite spammy.

pace2• 15 years ago

Yeah, you are right, it was rather too quick to repost—but hey that can happen when founder are enthusiastic about their product. And their were tons of redundant Godaddy SOPA posts—that can happen on a social news site, I am not angry about the repost, maybe next time they should think about a new hook but badger is a promising product with an awesome domain search—I tried it and I like it. So before snitching them try the product once.

We are all founders and if there is one who might be a bit too spammy, too pushy, too persisent, we flag, downvote him—we should hold together. Starting something, especially a domain registrar isn't easy (and there is a need!) and we should support every one of us.

Disclaimer: I've nothing to do with badger, I don't know them

caw2• 15 years ago

The question was more of an open one, of what's seen as allowable and what's not. My post wasn't intended to be a snitch, it was more of a reference other posts/responses about the same service.

I for one didn't see a problem in the repost. The format is different (the other really only showed up under "ask", and this is on the main page), and badger said they removed the invite only, which is definitely a milestone on releasing a product. I'm glad they reposted without 'SOPA' in the title; I for one was starting to ignore that word on HN.

Congratulations to Badger for creating a new registrar. I'm sure there were a lot of hurdles to jump through.

BiosElement• 15 years ago

I look forward to seeing where this goes. ^_^

nvictor• 15 years ago

All the domain registration thing aside, that's a blazing fast web design. Kudos to the developers!

Show HN: Badger.com is a brand new domain registrar (GoDaddy competitor)

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