A good registrar is hard to find. I've worked with Dotster.com, DomainsAreFree.com, and several others. I've learned a few things. The first thing is that in order to preserve and protect your web presence, you need to be in control of your domains. You can't have a third party register them for you because they register them in their name and not yours and use that as leverage when you try to transfer your service to another party.  Some of the problems you'll encounter with a deadbeat domain registrar is web based customer service where there is no chat and only email exchanges. This is extremely frustrating if you're trying to resolve an issue or figure out how to use their customer control panels to update your DNS name servers or another unfamiliar task. The biggest problem however, is when the registrars rebill your for the domain name and then they don't reregister the domain name with the ICANN service and some cybersquatter snatches up the domain name to put up a spam site at your former domain because it's now available on the open market.  You will lose all your intellectual property if this happens to you or it will be very very very costly to recover the domain name.