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Apologies in advance if this is not the appropriate board for my question.

I've encountered several clients with multiple domain names who, for whatever reasons, have their domain registrations handled by just as many registrars, including quite a few sketchy outfits that look like they might be run by some high school student. I have no reason to believe this setup was strategically planned on their part.

Should I leave well enough alone or in these cases should I encourage them to transfer the handling of their domain registrations to their web host (who also is capable of handling registration)? It would certainly ease administration, and allow them to only need to maintain one set of credentials, since they never have their login info for these obscure vendors anyway. Generally their web host is a major player (Dreamhost, GoDaddy, etc.) whereas their registrar is not.

Thanks!

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Certain TLDs are only offered by a select number of registries, so you may have trouble moving them to other registrars, depending on the TLDs.

Other than that, you should migrate them if you can to the same registrar. That way they won't get forgotten to be renewed, or if you need to update the nameservers or glue records you don't have to hunt around.

As to whether or not to move the registrations to the web host, I'm not a huge fan of that. Putting all your eggs in the one basket is sometimes fine, but sometimes not. If the web host disappears (i.e. goes out of business), you've lost your registrar as well. Although it's pretty rare to find a registrar who doesn't offer web hosting these days.

Same goes for DNS. I would never hold my DNS with my registrar or a web host. I'd hold them with a specialised DNS provider.

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    On top of that many good web hosts have awful domain management. I have all my domains at a provider which lets me edit the zonefiles directly, their webhosting though... :) Mar 15, 2014 at 23:33

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