glg wrote:
Wow, I'm sorry to say it, but you're a sucker. Network Solutions has ludicrous prices for no reason other than that people like you pay them. What on earth are you getting for $35/year that you can't get elsewhere for less than a third of that?
That's a little harsh. Even with some of the cheapest hosting, you're only talking about a difference of maybe $20
a year. BTW, at a 10-year plan the cost is around $28/year (domain plus private registration, assuming it isn't wrapped into another package).
Being in Lester's shoes with one of our domains, for me it's definitely more effort to switch registrars and deal with the transition then I want to bother with - the minor difference in savings is pretty much noise, particularly for a single domain.
A the risk of appearing to take an advocacy position, or start a registrar discussion (for which there have been other threads) there is some value included. For one thing, there's 7x24 real live person support included, which is rarely something included in cheaper offerings (if live support is available at all). There can also be some differences in how the cheaper privacy guards are set up.
Anyway, Lester, there's no need to worry about switching registrars if you'd just like to delegate DNS hosting elsewhere. You can just tell Network Solutions that your domain is using servers other than theirs for DNS and leave everything else in place.
On the main account DNS page, there should be an option to change where the domain points (I think in the same area as the advanced editing option). That's where you would install other servers (like ns1-ns5.linode.com) if you wanted to host your DNS elsewhere.
What you'd do is first dump (or record) your current DNS information as configured with Network Solutions. Set up a matching domain in Linode's (or whomever's) servers and make sure that queries to those servers work properly. Then re-configure NS. For a period of time (generally within 48 hours, though it's mostly stragglers after 24 hours or so) people may hit both servers so do this when there's no time critical changes you are making to DNS.
You can also always switch back if desired.
-- David