SiteDomains is a relatively new addition to Wealthy Affiliate’s suite of “Site” services. The addition of SiteDomains gives Wealthy Affiliate members a no-hassle, upsell-free way to register and manage domains.
…But All I Want Is A Domain
If you have ever registered a domain at Godaddy, NameCheap, or any other domain registrar for that matter, chances are you have had to endure page after page of upsells. It’s surpising they don’t even try to sell you your own kitchen sink.
Unfortunately, when you’re just getting started you don’t always know what you need, what you don’t need, and what you can get elsewhere at a better price and with better service. In these circumstances a $15 purchase quickly balloons into a $100 purchase as you are bombarded with offers to purchase email hosting, additional TLDs for your domain, antiquated site builders and more.
At Wealthy Affiliate, their main goal is to get people up and running with their websites with as little hassle as possible. They want their members to be able to focus on learning how to market themselves and their websites on the internet and not have to deal with a lot of technical stuff or be bent over a barrel because they’re new and don’t know any better.
Registering Domains With SiteDomains
Wealthy Affiliate has done away with upsells with their SiteDomains service. You simply search for the domain you want to register, add it to your cart, select the number of years you wish to register, enter your contact and billing information, agree to the terms and conditions, and you’re done. You don’t even have to debate whether to add WhoIs protection because they include it with every domain registration.
There you have it. Finally, a simplified domain registration process where they aren’t trying to raid your wallet for every last dollar.
Why Does SiteDomains Make Registering A Domain so Simple?
Your guess is as good as mine. However, if I had to take a gander I would say that Wealthy Affiliate knows that a lot of members are trying to boot strap their business and that the money that a newbie might spend buying extra bells and whistles at a different registrar while registering a domain could be better spent other places.
However, I also acknowledge the fact that the owners of Wealthy Affiliate are shrewd businessmen. I’m sure at some point they realized that they have a lot of members that register a lot of domains each year and they were leaving a lot of potential money on the table. Given that fact, they would be stupid to keep on sending people to other domain registrars and not come up with their own service, even if it is just being a reseller of Enom.
What has continually amazed me over the years is their business ethics. Time and time again I have seen the owners of Wealthy Affiliate be able to balance their business interests while keeping the best interests of everyone in the community in mind. In the 8 years I have spent at Wealthy Affiliate I have seen them promote exactly two other services besides the WA premium membership: Jaaxy and SiteDomains.
Compare that to the typical affiliate marketers in the “Make Money Online” space who get people subscribed to their email lists and just pound them with email after email of products that are the latest and greatest without any concern that they might actually doing their subscriber more harm than good by sending out promotion after promotion that’s designed to get their list to buy their latest recommendation.
What’s The Catch
There are a few drawbacks to SiteDomains. Registering a domain at SiteDomains is more expensive than let’s say NameCheap even when you take into account the extra money you spend for WhoIs protection at NameCheap.
My latest domain renewal fee at NameCheap was $10.87 + $2.88 for WhoIs protection for a grand total of $13.75. This is slightly cheaper than the current SiteDomains price of $13.99. You can also usually find a 10% coupon at NameCheap further pushing the price down to around $12.38. While SiteDomains is slightly more expensive, it’s actually fairly competitive with one of the cheapest domain registrars out there.
My only other complaint is that you CURRENTLY can’t update DNS records within their system. The only changes that can be made by yourself in their control panel are changing the name servers and forwarding the entire domain. However, I was recently informed by one of the owners that soon they will be releasing the ability to setup MX and CNAME records which should cover most needs of the current WA members.
Final Thoughts
SiteDomains is great for people who are just starting their first website and registering their first domain. It’s integration into the Wealthy Affiliate platform allows premium members to take advantage of SiteSupport that can help them directly should they run into any problems.
If you’re a seasoned website owner that’s setup a lot of websites and has registered a lot of domains, then SiteDomains may not have all of the functionality you need to manage your domains right now. However, I think Wealthy Affiliate will soon give it enough functionality that even more seasoned website owners will want to register their domains at SiteDomains.