Ask HN: Where have you registered your domains and why?
From business perspective, I am simply tired of $5.99 domain register fee that turns $59.99 a year later.
Then comes the security aspects, after all, the NS records are to be managed by the registrar.
So, kindly share where have you chosen to run your domains, and I am sure the community will benefit of hearing about a decent domain name service.
109 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 192 ms ] threadI still use Cloudflare as my DNS provider, mostly for its additional features.
ps: disclaimer: I work at Google, but not on the Domains team, and no relationship other than as a personal customer.
I have so many side projects that only last a year, so I typically just choose the cheapest option (which is often $1.14 )
.com domains seem to be obfuscated okay these days...
e.g. https://v4.gandi.net/whois/details?search=davewasthere.com&s...
I couldn't get my emails obfuscated on .com and .io addresses about 2~3 years ago. Just managed to get it done.
https://www.eugdpr.org for more information.
Otherwise, best I have used - and I've been through all the usual suspects.
They've got competitive pricing, free privacy (WHOIS guard), a straight forward interface, and an API for those who need it.
I have a few domains that are with GoDaddy simply because I paid for ten year registration years ago when they had special deals for that, and the ten years haven't expired yet. When they do I expect to move those remaining domains to Dreamhost as well.
Ten or so years ago when I was in high school and I put up a PHP web proxy at Dreamhost so that I could browse blocked sites on the school desktops. It ended up on some web proxy list and got flooded with traffic. I got the most kind email for such a blatant ToS violation:
> I've had to disable your domain due to it almost crashing the server because someone was hammering the proxy you put up there. We do not permit public proxy scripts on shared webservers; please remove the software. You may reenable the domain with non-proxy content if you wish.
Unfortunately this seems pretty common with a lot of new gTLDs.
I'd been using "Verio" for probably 15 years before and the last 5 of them were just awful. I should've never waited as long as I did to ditch them.
DNSMadeEasy for DNS, same reasons.
https://medium.com/@alexandernst/from-successful-to-zero-tha...
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1678818
I used to use Namecheap but they charged extra for Whoisguard, and I wasn't happy that they pulled the Daily Stormer (yes I hate Nazis, but IMO censorship should be handled by court orders not CEO's opinions.)
Used Gandi.net back in the day, had no complaints other than the price.
If a disgruntled employee knows your domain name, they can call Namecheap and claim its theirs. I had such trouble at one of my companies - while they didn't get a hold of the domain, upon validating company name, address and domain name, Namecheap opened the ticket for them and kept our domain on hold for 30 days before the situation got resolved. They did not shut it down, but we were unable to access it or change any DNS records. From my understanding, anyone upset at you enough can contact them and claim the domain is theirs and you stole it from them. That experience made me move out to Namesilo for USA domains, and Marcaria for international.
Source: I'm holding about 50 domains in general since circa 1999.
We use namecheap at work. Recently they have been messing up dns (I think it was a one time thing). Not a huge amount only like 3-6 domains out of 400ish, but it's silent. We caught most with monitoring, but have found several that slipped through the cracks since.
About 10 years ago I used pair.com because they also had PHP hosting and that's all I knew at the time. I did little with them.
I think for a very brief period I actually used godaddy for one or two domains.
A few years later I used gandi.net because they were "no BS" domain name registration, which I think was a direct reaction to having a hard time using godaddy. I mostly used it to point to custom slicehost servers. Later I also configured the DNS to point to github pages. Since they're in France, there's an extra step and extra few minutes before you get your domain names approved.
A few years after that I started using namecheap instead, and still use them. They give me the same amount of control as gandi.net but with a simpler (less confusing) interface, and they're in USA so they don't have the same delay that gandi.net has. I've pointed them to EC2 instances but mostly to github pages.
Recently I experimented with buying a few from Route 53 on AWS, mainly so I could see if it was all that big of an improvement to have everything on AWS. For some reason I'm getting charged like $2 every month for some (or all?) of these domain names, and it's a charge that's slightly annoying to me, mostly because I don't really understand what the charge is for (I think they said some sort of DNS routing fee or something?). I did like the integration with other services that Route 53 gave, but the flexibility and customization needed to get that integration working seemed like overkill and was definitely harder to figure out than the other services. Again I've used them successfully with both github pages and EC2.
Personally I would go with namecheap if I had to buy another domain name.
Pry NC out of my cold dead hands...
That said, who is recommended instead?
I too used Gandi at some point, but had an issue which led to a lot of BS. In short, and while not their fault, my credit card expired and that caused a few domains (5 or 6 -- all related) to go into quarantine. It was bad timing.
While their fee for registering the domains was not that high, getting them out of quarantine would have cost me $50 or 75 per domain. I transferred them out to IWantMyName (a NZ registrar, great service + works really well) _without_ having to pay any quarantine fees and just renewed them there for a year. Gandi refused to waive the quarantine fee saying "it was impossible", which was BS. My credit card had expired two days before.
I get that nothing is for free in this world, but if it would've been me in their situation, I would have waived the fee on this one occasion. Years later, I still retain those domains through IWMN.