My step by step instructions are now at step 13, and that’s before I get into any DNS alterations.

13 STEPS!?!?   What kind of e-commerce sales funnel is 13 steps?  I’m pretty sure I filled out my details 3 times and created a least 2 accounts. (I’m not sure – I’m still a little dizzy from the whole thing).  I do have about 5 long numbers now which I’m sure I’ll have to re-enter somewhere, at some point…

Many of the steps in the instructions I was tracking included things like ‘completely ignore everything on the page and just press the very tiny button at the bottom (the one hidden under the big button)’.  The 13 steps actually excludes some of the extra steps I had to take because it’s a .ca domain!!  Okay, so intructions through GoDaddy aren’t going to be part of my solution.  Register.com and Dotster.com have slightly cleaner processes (but not by much)

GoDaddy, Register, and some others offer resale program and APIs. The APIs are generally completely undocumented, and you get no indication of what is available (or even what technology is used) before they ask for the steep annual fee.  Register.com has the best API (it’s xml based) I’ve see, but so far it seems to be a big flat convoluted set of URLs.

Now, I’m sure most of these companies are making lots of money, I just wanted to rant about how annoying I find it all to be from my perspective as a consumer.