Q:

reliable place to buy .io domains

I'm looking around trying to find a good place to buy .io domains.
Suddenly, I think I'm surrounded by scammers, since .io domain providers websites, are really badly-designed and I am not feeling of confident about dealing with them.
I'm trying to deal with nic.io guys right now.
If somebody could point me out some company, it would be appreciated. Specially because the domain costs £60. It's not that cheap to spend with someone that could just leave you waiting for some answer after the payment.

A:

Nic.io seems to be the official registry and primary registrar for registering .io domains, so if you don't want to register through them, you're SOL. There are other registrars that also sell .io domains, but they're still just going through nic.io.
I'm sorry if you have bad feelings about nic.io, but that's just the nature of the domain name industry. When you have a regulatory agency like ICANN/Network Solutions, the industry naturally becomes dominated by sleazy companies. You can thank cronyism for that.

