Ask HN: Namecheap jacked up the price on a domain name, can you explain?
Namecheap just quoted me $24 for registration of a domain name, multiple times. After attempting to add it to my cart, each time, it failed to add to cart. Now when I search for the domain, it quotes me $1.5k.
I've never had this happen before with Namecheap. What gives? I'm trying to assume the best. What is an explanation here that is not malicious intent?
21 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 48.9 ms ] threadI disagree. If a company portrays itself explicitly or implicitly as offering low prices them it's more than fair when they jack up prices.
Namecheap's own description is "Buy cheap domain names and enjoy 24/7 support."
I do not understand why people feel the need to play the role of a corporate white knight and do their best to shield them from any criticism.
FWIW, "quit whiteknighting for the megacorps", when someone rejects a comment that happens to slight a corporation, is just as tired as their complaint no matter how effective "down with teh corporations!1" is on social media.
That makes as much sense as accusing someone of whiteknighting just because they happen to defend a female politician or whoever.
Namecheap advertises cheap domains when, as covered in this discussion, it jacks up prices. This is impossible to defend even by the staunchest corporate shill.
Anyone can opt to go off tangents playing semantics games. Meanwhile, if a company portrays itself as selling cheap products and services and then charges a hefty premium in exchange for nothing, they deserve being called out on what amounts to false advertising.
> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
GP suggested the complaint about nameCHEAP wasn't well received because it's boring, not because it's wrong or unfair. It's not a semantic game I'm playing, I agree that the reason the complaint wouldn't be well received is because it is boring/not interesting.
Downvotes may not mean "this company doesn't deserve to be called out." They may mean "I didn't come here to wade through boring content."
The risks with getting caught doing that intentionally are very high, but preventing any employee with access to lookup information, email addresses, etc, from selling it has been a very hard problem that most large names have admitted to failing at a few times.
It's about as interesting as the armchair philosophy 101 HN comment that humans are also nothing more than statistical token prediction machines.
It would be such a bummer if my brain wasn't just finding patterns that didn't really exist in the noise of consumerism and NameCheap started taking on dark patterns like this. Vetting and switching registrars is a headache.
After a run around with support, I switched to another provider. What's silly is the domains were for my own use only (some VPS servers). I frankly would never recommend Namecheap. Despite their popularity, they're terrible in my experience.
No sense tripping up all the gTLD and registars’ mousetraps of shady jacked-up pricing scheme.