The only registrars I suggest are DirectNIC and
Namecheap.
DirectNIC has defended customers in the past, and they've never confiscated a domain for bogus reasons either -- unlike Godaddy. That's the primary reason I've stayed with them -- I know that my domains are MY domains.
I've been with them since 2000.
However, they completely changed their domain system in 2013, and I'm not too impressed with how well it works. At first, it worked VERY poorly. A domain's nameservers would not be updated for hours in their system, which was totally unacceptable. When an update is made, it should be instant. (I'm NOT talking about propagation! Just the master records for the domain at the registrar.) It took months to get better -- and that was too slow for my liking. So I migrated some important domains to
Namecheap. The only benefit of the new system is that DNS is now free -- it was previously $5 per domain!
Namecheap is an excellent registrar...
...but their free DNS has been getting DDoS'd by major attacks in the recent past. Several of the attacks could not be mitigated, and caused many sites to go down for hours. The server that a site was on was fine, but it could not be found because of the DNS. This site (digitalFAQ.com) was using Namecheap for DNS, but after the second attack, I moved our DNS to the commercial DNS Made Easy service.
Simply put, use them for domains, not DNS.
Namecheap prides itself on being the anti-Godaddy of domain registration. Godaddy has many shady anti-consumer policies regarding domains, as buried in the fine print. Namecheap does not. The SOPA and dead elephants incidents caused many people to leave Godaddy for Namecheap.
