MAJOR REGISTRARS - Over the last few years domain prices have fallen dramatically. Gone are the days of paying $30 for a dot com extension, with prices now around $8. Most people use the same handful of the biggest and best known registrars. The emphasis is on how cheaply can you register a name. The cheapest company usually wins.

These companies have hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions of customers and when you need help with a question or have a problem you need fixing, the only method is normally through reading pages and pages of generic questions and answers in a knowledge base, then raising a support ticket. Usually each response to your ticket is from a different person, who only knows what is being done by reading the previous entries.

To make matters worse, support tickets often leave the problem unsolved or only half fixed. Sometimes they get automatically closed after the first reply. Sometimes they never get answered at all! Eventually you have to go searching the web looking for the answer yourself, post in forums or just give up and put up with the problem.

I like to use the analogy of a supermarket compared to a local store. Sure the prices are cheaper, but how many times have you walked out of a supermarket either because you couldn't find anyone to help you, or if you did - they didn't know the answer anyway?

The problem becomes even worse if the registrar is also hosting your website. It only takes a few support tickets before you start to get ignored or get the brush off. They simply don't have the time to spend with you. It is not that they do not want to help you - they just cannot cope with so many customers and problems at once.

DOMAIN RESELLERS - This is where the domain reseller, or agent as I prefer to call them, steps in. Agents are given permission to register domains on behalf of the registrar, but using their own website. They buy the domains wholesale and sell them retail. You pay a few dollars more, but you get your own personal agent in return. Agents usually only have one or two hundred customers and have the time to spend helping you, that the parent company doesn't. In fact, the agent is usually required by the registrar to handle their own customer's questions. The registrar provides backup support, but expects the agent to provide frontline support.

Agents often also resell the parent company's web hosting too or hosting they have purchased through another company. They are free to set their domain and hosting prices at whatever level they choose. Of course, if they set them too high - no one will buy from them. If they set them too low - they don't make enough money to survive. People will still only pay so much for support.

CHOOSING A RESELLER - So, what sort of things should you be looking for in a reseller? How do you tell a good one from a bad one? Firstly, check their pricing. If it is too high, they are probably not getting much business. Next, which registrar are they using? Do some homework on the registrar and find out if they are ICANN accredited, and accredited for the other country's domains they sell. See if they offer custom web hosting to suit you, or are you forced to only buy expensive packages far too large for your use?

If they appear to know what they are talking about, send them some emails asking pre-sales questions and see how long they take to reply and how you feel about the tone of their response. Remember, the agent you choose is going to be your personal "mentor". If you don't feel comfortable with them, you are not going to experience the potential benefits of using an agent.

A good agent will have been down the rocky road and learned all the traps - often the hard way! You can get enormous benefit from their experiences - both good and bad. A poor agent is usually just in it for the money and is not really interested in you as a person.