Namecheap cannot be trusted. I purchased a domain for a "normal" price (and yes, I have receipts). Shortly after they realized they fucked up, voided the purchase, and made it a $1,500 premium domain. Obviously, my recommendation is to avoid Namecheap.
Indeed. Personally I would never pay for any service whose name includes the word "cheap" (it's literally why I gave this one a wide berth despite all the breathless recommendations here and elsewhere). Cheapness should never be the declared mission of a business, it should be the incidental by-product.
Yea they did something like this with us. Fully turned off our business domain because we didn’t reply to a phishing email in 48 hours. We migrated out the next day once we got it resolved. It took over 6 hours from when we noticed the issue and responded until they turned it back on. Absolutely horrible service.
Moved my domain from namecheap to cloudflare that I use for Fastmail. There was a bit of a song and dance because CF requires you use its own name servers, but I had codex do it for me in chrome. Would recommend.
I purchased a domain name from them yesterday, in addition to a few I already had.
This will be the last purchase unless I see some significant traction in the case we're discussing in particular, and company wide in general.
Hope others will do the same. Not punishing this behavior is encouraging such abuse in the entire industry (if Namecheap gets away with that, everyone else will follow).
I remember years and years ago moving all my domains to Namecheap because they were considered "the good guys." I suppose I'm going to have to start looking around once again to see who are currently the good guys.
IMO Cloudflare is the closest thing to a "good guy" these days. Very customer friendly, affordable and generally fairly ethical (if you pass over the part where they share data with the NSA).
I like Cloudflare as a company but I’d be weary about paying for my domains and hosting my DNS with the same publicly traded company with a severe lack of public customer service outside devs getting mad on twitter (guilty!).
If cloudflare gets mad at you (even accidentally) and cancels your account then you lose everything. At least if you separate them, there is a chance that you won’t lose access to both at one time. Given that domains are generally a one time setup after purchase (especially if you use cloudflare for DNS) then I think the minor inconvenience is worth it, personally.
I feel the same way. I think I want three different companies to be my domain registrar, DNS provider, and VPS host, for redundancy. Putting all eggs in one basket seems like a bad idea.
I abuse https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/ as a domain registrar. I really like their astetic(pre pay, simple, no fluff) but it turns out the sort of stuff I want to run on the internet is a poor match for their infrastructure so don't actually use nfsn in their primary web host role.
I use nfs as host too. Didn't know they did registrar. Thanks.
Ya every time I installed a slightly involved CMS it was a broken headache for some technical reason, so I gave that up. Made my own superuninvolved CMS and that works fine.
I use them as my registrar as well; I had started with them as everything for a tiny site I wanted to host separately, and then it was easy-ish to move my other domains.
But I don't think it's a business they really nurture. There's no way to setup automatic payments, which feels important as you have many domains. And setting glue records requires a support request, where as most other registrars provide user facing interfaces to do it without help from a support rep.
Is there a directory of private equity acquisitions? Maybe even a browser extension that flags the websites of acquired companies.
Such acquisitions are often due to founders cashing out or retiring, and the first thing private equity does is switch gears to "extraction mode". As such, I would think twice before (a) making a long-term commitment to their services, or (b) spending time applying for a job there.
I like this site, but looking at it right now, I'm seeing some obvious Opus 5 era Claudese in here [1]. I'm not sure how much I can trust something written lazily by an LLM, as it means there's no way to know if there's a human in the loop or if someone just has a Hermes agent out there doing automated research and writing it up automatically.
if an owner/developer is content with publishing a site that looks similar to all other sloppily built ai interfaces, it usually means that the same amount of care has gone into the product/backend.
That's a pretty big stretch. I'm a very competent backend developer and product owner, but a bang-average front developer. It's okay to lean on AI for your weaknesses.
It's 2026 and people have had a lot of exposure to AI writing and have developed views and preferences. That's equally a genie that can't go back in the bottle.
Regardless, when people claim not to have generated something they demonstrably did, that damages their credibility and suggests the document is unreliable.
Damnit. I liked them for their simplicity, lack of bullshit, and cheaq costs. Know any recommended alternatives? (Edit: Nevermind, I see are suggestions elsewhere in this discussion).
I dont have a horse in this race, but it used to main namecheap since all the way back to 2015, support was the best, prices and offerings too, but they really fucked me over a few times, were i did ended up losing a good domain name and then they sniped 2 domain name searches i had locked in but failed to buy... that one is absolutely truthful, if you land on something good you either pay for it or some mysterious squatting entity will get them in matter of hours.
These days I just use Cloudflare and Marcaría for stuff thats not available on Cloudflare. CF may not be the most trustful company out there, but it is nice to have everything in one ecosystem. Plus, you can deploy a site using their workers, so essentially you can go from domain name to website in 5 minutes including ssl and whatever else you can think of, including bot protection and good metrics.
To give people a bit of insight into the domain registry industry, when a registrar increase domain prices there are generally four reason why they do it.
1) The registrar want to increase its margins.
2) The registry upstream increased their price. For .com, Verisign registrar agreement allow Verisign to increase the price by 7% in each of the final four years of every six-year cycle. As such they increased it in 2024 and will do so again on November 1, 2026.
3) The registrar is not a direct registrar and uses a middle man, and the middle man want to increase its margins.
4) The buyer or the registrar is operating on a different currency than the registry, and the registrar is compensating for changes in the currency valuation.
They were already a sub-par registrar a decade ago, or more. You can find many namecheap horror stories without much trouble. I moved away from them years ago due to various shenanigans and never looked back.
A decade ago, they were the name that popped up any time you would ask for registrar recommendations. Problems were relatively few. The real problems started in September of 2025 when the private equity firm CVC Capital Partners purchased a majority stake. Big surprise, they quickly went to shit. Not sure what CVC's plan was to make a return on their $1.5 billion investment, but it can't be working out well for them.
Out of curiosity where are people going for their domains. I have a GoDaddy because changing seems like a task that would be more annoying than it is worth and that is even if you can find a place that is better.
This is just my jaded take but I suspect that whomever is good today may be gone in the not too distant future. I have been watching registrars get gobbled up by investment groups that have no knowledge of or interest in DNS. They seem to be milking these registrars and leaving behind broken husks.
There should probably be a deadpool board that lists all the registrars and lets people bet on which will be the last ones standing. I am going to guess a couple of the last ones standing (that still have something resembling technical staff) will be Amazon and Cloudflare and to be clear I did not say anyone can reach their technical staff.
Whatever the consensus will ultimately be in this thread this week will probably be registrars we perform libation for in the coming years.
Cloudflare. They sell at cost, and their entire business is around DNS and caching so they have no reason to decide to stop selling domains in the future or mess with us.
It's not a bad option nowadays, but I feel the strongest option is going with a provider that charges money for the service provided, not someone that does it for free and has other priorities and monetization streams. That is always going to lead to suboptimal service
Porkbun. Do not go with Cloudflare, even if their at-cost price seems attractive - at some point you may wish to run your own name server, and Cloudflare does not allow this for domains you keep with them, because the traffic data is of obvious interest to them.
I'm all "well shit" reading this, I must have missed all of these issues. I'm not 100% sure, but at the moment, I'm thinking, AWS.
I know, Amazon isn't super cool, and are imperfect in a bunch of ways. But at least it appears to be highly configurable and cheap, and Amazon ain't gonna get bought out by private equity and enshittified, legally bullied into oblivion, generally has pretty good quality and competent support, and has plenty of experience in not handing the keys to your castle of services to any random phone caller with a sob story.
A friend asked me to help him turn off renewal on some of his GoDaddy domains this week. Wow, talk about dark patterns. This is the darkest of the dark. Thank god AI knew where to find the option. You still have to click cancel about 8 times on each domain.
I moved to NameCheap many years ago precisely because GoDaddy was such a miserable company to work with.
Disappointed in the VC move but I don't have any complaints at the moment. I have had good experiences with Cloudflare for other services so feel predisposed to them.
I'm on EuroDNS as domain registrar for many years, parked there a couple of companies where I worked. They don't have scammy vibe of other registrars, have multi-user accounts, which is convenient for businesses.
What namecheap is doing seems to be a great way to lose most of the customers and go bankrupt. I don't think that's what private equity funds want when they acquire a business.
this is going to be an unpopular opinion, but this was the inevitable result of changing a function with trivial cost and broad social utility (name registration) from a public service to a commercial one. at the time we heard a lot of standard arguments about the innovation and competition that only a market based solution could bring. its really not a surprise that this is the kind of innovation that resulted.
Good news: you can choose a ccTLD (.us, .eu, etc); they're run by national government (or their designated operator), and the national government has sovereign control over how it's run.
On the other hand, if you want to have a say in how other registries are run, then consider joining an at-large structure (ALS) local to you or the Non-Commercial Stakeholders Group: https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/civil-society
I certainly wasn't nominating the US government. something more like international NGO. the us can do whatever it wants with the .us root, just like all the other ISO country code roots.
the internet corporations for names and numbers was established specifically to coordinate the for profit registrar model. but sure, an organization like that with a charter to simply manage the namespace directly.
Are you trying to suggest that the issue in the current post has the same underlying cause (not doing business with countries on the other side of a war)?
I assume that the underlying reason is "badly organized, badly managed, making stupid decisions overall". Certainly sounds like something you should not trust as your business partner.
I read this particular comment[0] and I can't say that I understand the connection you're suggesting. If I ran a company and they were directly attacking the city were ~1k of my employees live[1], I wouldn't want to do business with them either.
No, I don’t see how one follows from the other. Most of us are not Russian and don’t have websites NC would consider relevant to the war.
On the other hand, most of us probably can imagine not checking our email for three days, getting caught up in some automated purgatory, and experiencing customer neglect. We can imagine this because it is the default customer experience these days.
Well you know I don't see how 'registered in Russia' has anything to do with the war. In 2022 alone about 1.5m people emigrated, and are still 'registered in Russia'.
This was a poorly thought-out virtue-signalling knee-jerk back then and of course everyone in their right mind transferred their domains out because this is not how you do business.
Next thing, you're going to argue that when the US sanctioned the whole population of Crimea back in 2014, that also was "a poorly thought-out virtue-signalling knee-jerk" reaction that worsened, for no good reason, the situation of the helpless Ukrainians who had happened to live there and now also had to live under Russia's brutal rule and face the international isolation. But you'd be wrong.
I’ve found really great but quite unique .com domain names available on name cheap then mysteriously gone registered to name cheap within hours, available for purchase at thousands.
Always strenuously denied by the name cheap CEO “we do not front run domain names!”.
I'm an Iranian---which is something you have no choice in, you just turn 4~5 and understand enough language that they tell you that you are an Iranian. And well out of believing namecheap is a good company (since I had my DNS there) I purchased my domain from them. Then one day these fuckers banned my domain, and my access to the dashboard without any warnings or headsup, didn't even allow me to move my domain to somewhere else, and those vultures from GoDaddy bought it in the auction and have put it for 3500€... Horrible people
Yeah, but you don't have to be such horrible people about it. At least give the person a few days to move their stuff. And I wasn't checking it from Iran.
> Yeah, but you don't have to be such horrible people about it. At least give the person a few days to move their stuff.
That’s not how sanctions work. A company can’t knowingly service a customer under sanctions. If your account was termination for sanction related reasons, they have no choice but to shut it down as fast as possible once they know that fact.
They cannot continue to service it for a few days or even service transfer requests. It’s a hard stop.
I understand you’re angry, but I don’t think you understand what sanctions mean if this is a surprise to you.
Sanctions are a hard cutoff. There isn’t room to allow serving sanctioned customers for a little while or giving them services to allow an off ramp. Sanctions mean “You must not serve these customers”. As soon as a company discovers they’ve been accidentally serving a sanctioned customer, they must stop immediately. If they were to continue giving them service or a grace period, they are violating the sanctions.
There’s always someone willing to explain how sanctions work to those who are subject to them. Thank you for your work, sir. What would we do without you.
Hey, it's not enough that your own government oppresses you — you better get some additional oppression from the overseas, just to make sure you know they have your best interests at their heart, honest-honest.
Don't you say. You don't even know what was that horrible treatment exactly - didn't even ask, why would you, right? - but you've promptly explained to the guy that it was his fucking fault - he's from the sanctioned country after all, he should know his place and be quiet. You guys are just adorable, aren't you?
this is one of the worst trends in modern time - "AML" and "KYC" being shoved into everything, requiring you to attach your own identity into everything and send your ID/passport to vendors left and right, no right to privacy at all.
Absolutely agree—it's disgusting. I use Njalla for my domain even though they aren't a free speech provider, at all, I likely won't come into conflict with them and they won't require KYC.
Splitting them round robin, or even in half, sounds horrible.
But maybe if you have 1 (one) backup domain like mydomain.net then you can host that on another vendor. But I'd rather just fail and focus on restoring at that point, you are still losing all traffic to the main domain, and contacting users with a secondary domain they've never heard off is a security posture nightmare and unprofessional.
Right, but they were too cheap and too good, and people that are aggressively fishing for optimal prices went with them, even if the margins don't work out. Then at some point they sell the business to PE who might just have an idea to monetize the millions of clients that signed up for what is effectively a reseller whose core business proposition is having the lowest margins in the market.
I was taught not to count the margin of your vendors, but you at least need to make sure they have healthy margins so they are happy with your business and not constantly hungry and looking for other sources of income, even if it means betraying you.
It asks you to choose 4 (four!) "secret questions" as a "security" measure. I decided that keeping your domains with an organization that insists on idiotic practices that are firmly forbidden by every sensible security practices guide (OWASP, NIST 800-63, anything, really) since like 2015 is not a very wise choice.
You do you, but that is enough of a red flag to actually mention when somebody recommends Dynadot to everyone else without much elaboration.
Also, banks are really different from domain registrars in several important and relevant respects, but, for the record, I don't have to tell it to the banks I use, and if I did, I'd probably be looking for a bank that I don't have to tell it to.
Technical support sees the answer to the question in plain text, so after you read first three random characters correctly they will confirm your identity and then patiently wait until you finish reading.
Also my real mother maiden name is almost equally hard to comprehend for english-speaking tech support, so it doesn't make much of a difference.
> mother's maiden name: 14t&7--ghv&32@/apER;Aa0)/90sIs
This isn't a good idea....
If using random text, there are many examples of, when asked to answer a secret question, telling the call centre droid "I just hit a few random keys for that one" and this being accepted.
You would do well to assume each call centre droid is a board kid more interested in his co-workers tits than your clever answers to security questions.
No, they also disabled a domain with 20k user subdomains without notice based on an abuse report that was weeks old and the site long disabled. Wouldn't trust them with a proper abuse process.
I’ve got some domains in Cloudflare and some in Porkbun. No issues yet. I also like how straightforward Porkbun is while still supporting API automation and team accounts.
Domain names aren't the money maker for Cloudflare. Having the domain with them so that you'll eventually use them for other things is. That's why everything is at cost.
It's a great place to keep your domain names. Beyond that is up to you.
Wanted to dog pile on this - Godaddy gave away my entire account back when I was younger. I lost lots of domains, including my website, "strategywiki.org".
Porkbun for me. I tried using CF's domain service and at least at that time it was hard for me to tell head from the tail on their interface. Hope that has changed. (I just wanted to distribute my domains between the two serices, otherwise Porkbun is fine as it is).
Porkbun was very pleasant to use, would definitely recommend them!
I wanted something in the EU, so I went with INWX - their UI is quite unintuitive/bad in my eyes though. I guess Hostinger/IONOS/Gandi/... would also be pretty popular for anyone like me.
Yes, TransIP is good, but expensive. I always liked their service, when you have questions getting an answer within the hour via their online support interface. But I'm migrating away now (esp. with VPS'es as the prices here are waaay too high). Using OVHCloud now.
I was just checking them out as a possible place to move my DNS names to. Looks like it's a whopping $0.50/month if you use their nameservers per address, plus $0.40 per million queries, prorated, So probably tough to spend more than $1 a month on without having Google-scale and spending way more than that on servers.
Based on just my multi-year experience with a reliable interface.
So anyone else with a view on the company might chime in. But I am writing this because I have been very happy with them. None of the glitchy inscrutable experiences so many companies manage/love to design into their services.
Oh, the checkbox that turns off automatic renewal can take a second or two to register. So not perfect, but close. If that sounds trivial, you have understood why I like them.
That is not actually a registrar - it's a proxy service that registers the domain for you and lets you use it.
They also make no secret they will take your domain back if you use it to host a neonazi site and have done this several times already from neonazi groups who thought they were getting a secure experience.
A few years ago, I experienced absolutely stellar service from Gandi when (due to negligence of the previous registrar) I had trouble moving a domain in.
A couple of months ago, my main domain was offline for over a day due to a configuration snag that I could not resolve on my own, and Gandi's customer service now has ridiculously short hours (pretty much only in the morning), took quite a while to respond, and didn't provide much background info on the underlying issue.
I was amazed by the drastic change in quality, and I'll move my domains out soon. Where to is a still open question, though.
EDIT: I just read in a sibling thread that Gandi has been bought by private equity a while ago, that explains a lot.
I did a whois lookup now, and it seems like your domain still has privacy protection (or it was applied by Namecheap again) and is violating the registry rules.
If your business strategy involves going with a vendor with 'cheap' in the name, that's probably the Root Cause of most issues that arise from that vendor
namecheap was decent, unfortunately the lesson people need to learn is that not everything stays decent, not in the current share-holder asskissing climate
If the business proposition is being "cheap", then they will have to undercut everyone
If you undercut everyone, they will undercut competitors with the same strategy
If a cheap competitor undercuts a cheap competitor margins will tend to zero
If a competitor is pricing at zero and you need to undercut them, you will operate at a loss
Eventually the company will either shut down, or be liquidated, its valuable assets (the existing contracts and list of customers) will be bought by competitor or Private Equity.
This is common in domains, thousands of registrars get acquired by a megacorp, see NewFold Digital.
So in essence, when the business proposition is being cheap, the natural consequence is the business dying and being sold for parts to a purchaser that will have to degrade the cost to value relationship that got the customers in the first place.
> If the business proposition is being "cheap", then they will have to undercut everyone
Consider a market with three suppliers.
Supplier A charges $12.00 and is widely regarded to be The Worst. Their only support is a broken chatbot with a tendency to lock your account at random and their UI is full of dark patterns that trigger hidden fees.
Supplier B charges $12.50 and is widely regarded to be a reasonable operator that will rarely screw you and offers basic no-frills service.
Supplier C charges $20.00 and is widely regarded to be a reasonable operator that will rarely screw you and offers a bunch of convenience features and integration with WordPress or something.
Which one are you going to choose? Maybe C if you want the convenience features, maybe B if you want the lower price, but never A, right?
Now suppose you're B and you want to pick a name that emphasizes that you have a lower price than C.
At scale, A. At scale people are going to choose A.
The market of people who have been burned and value support is <<< everyone else who is just getting stuff done and don’t care, or don’t have the money to care.
> At scale, A. At scale people are going to choose A.
That's what the cynics always say, but do people actually choose A when B is available?
It's not just cars, look at landscaping, cleaning or handyman services, barber shops, etc. These are all commodities. How many coffee shops stay in business by providing poor service and bad coffee?
That's a nice thought experiment, but in practice, there's plenty of actors that provide good service at the cheapest prices.
How? Magic? No, they operate at a loss for years, (especially if the loss is very marginal, which is the case for selling domains at 10$ instead of 11$).
The profit is pushed in the temporal scale into the future through investment, instead of needing to extract profit instantly at every moment.
This is known as price dumping and it occurs in thousands of industries.
This is an interesting chain of events, but PE will buy the company regardless of whether the four steps you've listed took place or not. Hell, they'd rather buy companies with fat margins, than ones with near-zero margins.
namecheap was created in 2000, maybe today cheap is such a bad word to have in the name but not in the year 2000, when buying .coms was the hype equivalent of chatting with AI today
Like I have said previously¹ about choosing a registrar: If you have regular backups, and if some downtime is not really a problem, it might be fine to use web site hosting, e-mail (and in extreme cases even DNS hosting), from some fly-by-night el cheapo provider. But your domain name registrar? Pick them carefully, don’t skimp, and make sure they have good support. Because when things go pear-shaped, you really want to be able to actually talk to someone to change your web server or e-mail DNS records (or even DNS servers) to somewhere else.
Big registrars can’t afford any support costs since they prefer to squeeze the price down as far as possible, and therefore they prefer to simply lose or outright drop any customer in case of any and all problems. Conversely, small registrars may charge more, but have better (i.e. actually existing, and sometimes even dedicated and personal) support for when things go wrong, and have a vested interest in keeping you as a customer.
A small registrar might also be so small as to know you personally, which will help monumentally against any social engineering attacks.
Full disclosure: I work at such a registrar, but you’re probably not in our target market.
>But your domain name registrar? Pick them carefully, don’t skimp,
Especially because domain names are not expensive anyways, a dot com (gold standard of domains) has a cost to registrars of like 11 USD right now, so registrars can charge anywhere between 15 USD and 25 USD, maybe you can find one selling at cost at 11USD or at a loss with promotions even!
But we are talking about saving 10$/year? That's less than 1$/mo. Trying to save 1$/mo is strictly in the terrain of underfunding your business, if you can't allocate enough funds so that Domain costs become a non-issue (and a provider like namecheap stops being attractive) then you will fail in a thousand ways, it's not just about domains at this point.
Your water bill costs more than this. Your toilet rolls cost more than this. And certainly a cleaner costs more than this, if you have a business premise.
I was pleasantly surprised at how good the support was for my budget personal vps with a big provider, but I agree with your argument; if I was in charge of a business-critical domain then I would be arguing for a budget to cover something more boutique.
Picking a small registrar to optimize for reliability seems iffy. Perhaps today there's a passionate and knowledge owner personally picking up the phone (or empowering a small custom service department). But will that person still be doing that in 3 years time, or will they have moved on?
I have worked at my current small company for more than 10 years, and the company itself existed for more than 10 years before I started working there. Companies which take significant outside investment are doomed to die trying to get big, but not all small companies are like that.
I appreciate you sharing your perspective, but "I'm not telling you who I work for because you'll find us if you need us" coupled with "find your own in a small geographic radius" isn't broadly helpful in any way. I was hopeful to see if I could divest some DNS risk, then just got hit with your IYKYK wall of uselessness. I did search for niche providers around me, but I think we're in wildly different markets. Maybe just the nudge to search is helpful for some people, but I found it to be a fruitless rabbit hole.
My advice is: Find a small registrar in your jurisdiction, as reasonably close to you as you can find. I think this is good, actionable, advice. If this happens to be the same jurisdiction and area as my company, you will find it.
But as I have written elsewhere¹, my company’s home page isn’t even available in English. You are most likely not in our target market.
I have used gandi.net for many years. They provided good support and offered things like free email forwarding. Then they were bought and the new owners just double or more prices and made anything extra including email a ridiculously expensive extra.
I'm sick of the game of whack a mole. Decades ago Network Solutions was expensive, yet still had horrid support. godaddy was new, friendlyyy, anf great, cue enshittification. Migrated, as one does to gandi - who of course gets a new owner, and becomes horrid.
Moved to namecheap. Honestly, thry've been great to me, for years, but now I'm worried. The reality is that for all the efforts we put into reducing SPOFs, scaling, and being ready for the inevitable, the registrar system is now a single point chokehold that provides serious risk.
This is especially disheartening when you remember OpenSRS. It explicitly wasn't supposed to be, and wasn't desgned to be that way.
Namecheap is not some random cheapo provider. They've been around for a long time and used to have a pretty solid reputation. They didn't have overly inflated prices, they had a okay customer support and good dashboard.
In the last few years they managed to destroy that reputation though.
I had a similar experience with Namecheap. Their bot crawled my website while it was still under construction and apparently reported it to some security databases, causing my domain to be flagged as suspicious.
Since then, my domain's reputation has been affected, and I often get security warnings when trying to access my own website through my company's VPN.
Namecheap simply informed me that it had been a mistake, but the damage was already done, and the issue still persists.
Sounds like Namecheap. They took one of my domains (held for many years) and try to sell it back to me for thousands because now it's a valuable domain.
OK, but seriously, if my domain name vanishes all the things I won't be able to log into are insane, and if I were selling goods as a company it would be even worse.
Namecheap is the worst! Our CTO left and our account was tied to his phone. Our CEO didn't want to talk to him, so, over chat, I made them remove the phone 2FA. They didn't authenticate me in any way - only gave them a good story and our username. I know people trash talk GoDaddy, but I've been the most happiest with them - they have support, if you have lots of domains, they assign to your an account exec that can do stuff for you. I've dealt with literally all registrars as I own thousands of domains. Nobody else comes close to GoDaddy - they have APIs, they have support, they listen. Plus, they are big and you can sue them - try suing company abroad if they mess up!
As far as I recall, Namecheap was based in Eastern Europe - as an Eastern European, I can tell you that I would never put anything important in an Eastern European company! Their new Spaceship offshoot is lipstick on a pig, literally.
Cloudflare is also not a good choice - you have no support! Porkbun may seem cool, but I'm not impressed as they lack some basic features such as profiles, let's say.
I always used TOTP with Namecheap and I kept the keys on three separate devices (one a friend's) in two different apps. One day their site just stopped accepting any of my TOTP codes.
Thankfully (and scarily) they did the same as you -- they removed the 2FA for me via chat so I could log in and reset it :D
Admittedly any company will have it's share of controversies over time. But their history speaks to a value system that doesn't square with some of the foundational values of the internet (openness, decentralisation, user empowerment) imo.
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[ 0.28 ms ] story [ 14.4 ms ] threadOh, hey, reddalo! We think you should have paid $995.00 for it. Give us that amount while the thing we sold you is hold as a ransom.
so costs need to go down (-human support + ai automation)
and prices go up (they increased i think .com 3 times this year alone)
I purchased a domain name from them yesterday, in addition to a few I already had.
This will be the last purchase unless I see some significant traction in the case we're discussing in particular, and company wide in general.
Hope others will do the same. Not punishing this behavior is encouraging such abuse in the entire industry (if Namecheap gets away with that, everyone else will follow).
If cloudflare gets mad at you (even accidentally) and cancels your account then you lose everything. At least if you separate them, there is a chance that you won’t lose access to both at one time. Given that domains are generally a one time setup after purchase (especially if you use cloudflare for DNS) then I think the minor inconvenience is worth it, personally.
but "numbers guys" say no, we need squeeze profits short term..
Ya every time I installed a slightly involved CMS it was a broken headache for some technical reason, so I gave that up. Made my own superuninvolved CMS and that works fine.
But I don't think it's a business they really nurture. There's no way to setup automatic payments, which feels important as you have many domains. And setting glue records requires a support request, where as most other registrars provide user facing interfaces to do it without help from a support rep.
Such acquisitions are often due to founders cashing out or retiring, and the first thing private equity does is switch gears to "extraction mode". As such, I would think twice before (a) making a long-term commitment to their services, or (b) spending time applying for a job there.
1: https://ledger.worseonpurpose.com/brands/new-balance "Why Approved" section
Regardless, when people claim not to have generated something they demonstrably did, that damages their credibility and suggests the document is unreliable.
CrunchBase is usually accurate:
https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/namecheap#financials
These days I just use Cloudflare and Marcaría for stuff thats not available on Cloudflare. CF may not be the most trustful company out there, but it is nice to have everything in one ecosystem. Plus, you can deploy a site using their workers, so essentially you can go from domain name to website in 5 minutes including ssl and whatever else you can think of, including bot protection and good metrics.
Ahhh crap, there goes the company down the toilet. And they were the place I trusted to buy my domain names from.
I'll have to move providers.
1) The registrar want to increase its margins.
2) The registry upstream increased their price. For .com, Verisign registrar agreement allow Verisign to increase the price by 7% in each of the final four years of every six-year cycle. As such they increased it in 2024 and will do so again on November 1, 2026.
3) The registrar is not a direct registrar and uses a middle man, and the middle man want to increase its margins.
4) The buyer or the registrar is operating on a different currency than the registry, and the registrar is compensating for changes in the currency valuation.
There should probably be a deadpool board that lists all the registrars and lets people bet on which will be the last ones standing. I am going to guess a couple of the last ones standing (that still have something resembling technical staff) will be Amazon and Cloudflare and to be clear I did not say anyone can reach their technical staff.
Whatever the consensus will ultimately be in this thread this week will probably be registrars we perform libation for in the coming years.
I know, Amazon isn't super cool, and are imperfect in a bunch of ways. But at least it appears to be highly configurable and cheap, and Amazon ain't gonna get bought out by private equity and enshittified, legally bullied into oblivion, generally has pretty good quality and competent support, and has plenty of experience in not handing the keys to your castle of services to any random phone caller with a sob story.
Disappointed in the VC move but I don't have any complaints at the moment. I have had good experiences with Cloudflare for other services so feel predisposed to them.
DNS etc can be run by third parties
Besides, which government do you want to run .com domains
On the other hand, if you want to have a say in how other registries are run, then consider joining an at-large structure (ALS) local to you or the Non-Commercial Stakeholders Group: https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/civil-society
Personally I would not want the US government controlling and micro-managing who gets to have a .com domain.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30504812
(Before reacting to the headline, please read at least some of the discussion.)
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30507103
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namecheap#Termination_of_servi...
On the other hand, most of us probably can imagine not checking our email for three days, getting caught up in some automated purgatory, and experiencing customer neglect. We can imagine this because it is the default customer experience these days.
This was a poorly thought-out virtue-signalling knee-jerk back then and of course everyone in their right mind transferred their domains out because this is not how you do business.
Now what?
Always strenuously denied by the name cheap CEO “we do not front run domain names!”.
I’d never do a domain name check there again.
Weird argument. Given they're in the US, not complying with US sanctions on Iran isn't an option either.
That’s not how sanctions work. A company can’t knowingly service a customer under sanctions. If your account was termination for sanction related reasons, they have no choice but to shut it down as fast as possible once they know that fact.
They cannot continue to service it for a few days or even service transfer requests. It’s a hard stop.
Sanctions are a hard cutoff. There isn’t room to allow serving sanctioned customers for a little while or giving them services to allow an off ramp. Sanctions mean “You must not serve these customers”. As soon as a company discovers they’ve been accidentally serving a sanctioned customer, they must stop immediately. If they were to continue giving them service or a grace period, they are violating the sanctions.
No, I don't think so.
But maybe if you have 1 (one) backup domain like mydomain.net then you can host that on another vendor. But I'd rather just fail and focus on restoring at that point, you are still losing all traffic to the main domain, and contacting users with a secondary domain they've never heard off is a security posture nightmare and unprofessional.
I was taught not to count the margin of your vendors, but you at least need to make sure they have healthy margins so they are happy with your business and not constantly hungry and looking for other sources of income, even if it means betraying you.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49028037
Namecheap banned a few domain names purely based on an ambiguous tweet that got 6 likes
https://x.com/Namecheap/status/1489485337885921284
Namecheap suspended Imgur in 2013 for 1 CSAM image out of millions
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5276648
Namecheap snipes your domains
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28732510
I'm planning to migrate out.
I've been waiting for the "porkbun screwed me" stories, but haven't seen any yet.
Are there any decent non-US based domain provider remaining at all?
That is the actual name of the company, not a statement on the scarcity of decent non-US based domain providers.
I just always use a plausible but false and unique answer, which I just keep track of in my password manager.
Also, banks are really different from domain registrars in several important and relevant respects, but, for the record, I don't have to tell it to the banks I use, and if I did, I'd probably be looking for a bank that I don't have to tell it to.
Also my real mother maiden name is almost equally hard to comprehend for english-speaking tech support, so it doesn't make much of a difference.
It's plausible, hard to guess, and harder to social enginer than "It's a bunch of random letters and numbers."
Porkbun doesn’t have this bullshit, how do they get by?
This isn't a good idea....
If using random text, there are many examples of, when asked to answer a secret question, telling the call centre droid "I just hit a few random keys for that one" and this being accepted.
You would do well to assume each call centre droid is a board kid more interested in his co-workers tits than your clever answers to security questions.
- Cloudflare
It's a great place to keep your domain names. Beyond that is up to you.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38062595
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32470260
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24507411
Looks like I'll be transitioning off of Namecheap now too.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47110362
[1]: https://kb.porkbun.com/article/72-how-to-push-a-domain-into-...
Sounds like a great way to prevent domain theft.
Kiwifarms is literally a doxxing site.
I wanted something in the EU, so I went with INWX - their UI is quite unintuitive/bad in my eyes though. I guess Hostinger/IONOS/Gandi/... would also be pretty popular for anyone like me.
I used to use TransIP.nl and while they are still good, they’ve gotten expensive over the last few years.
S&Ps use MarkMonitor.
But for domain registrations alone it's fine.
(And since the records are size-limited, per-GB is roughly the same thing.)
"Except for Alias A/AAAA records mapped to AWS services listed below, you incur charges for every DNS query answered by the Route 53 service."
https://aws.amazon.com/route53/pricing/
[0] Tucows, which stands for "The Ultimate Collection Of Winsock Software"
Based on just my multi-year experience with a reliable interface.
So anyone else with a view on the company might chime in. But I am writing this because I have been very happy with them. None of the glitchy inscrutable experiences so many companies manage/love to design into their services.
Oh, the checkbox that turns off automatic renewal can take a second or two to register. So not perfect, but close. If that sounds trivial, you have understood why I like them.
They also make no secret they will take your domain back if you use it to host a neonazi site and have done this several times already from neonazi groups who thought they were getting a secure experience.
ok? Should we not be removing trash from the internet? A company shouldn't need to be told to take down hate speach.
Where to?
I have like 20 domains with them, this is really bad news for me.
I was at GANDI but they became absolute trash and hostile towards their customers as well, hence why I left for Namecheap.
A few years ago, I experienced absolutely stellar service from Gandi when (due to negligence of the previous registrar) I had trouble moving a domain in.
A couple of months ago, my main domain was offline for over a day due to a configuration snag that I could not resolve on my own, and Gandi's customer service now has ridiculously short hours (pretty much only in the morning), took quite a while to respond, and didn't provide much background info on the underlying issue.
I was amazed by the drastic change in quality, and I'll move my domains out soon. Where to is a still open question, though.
EDIT: I just read in a sibling thread that Gandi has been bought by private equity a while ago, that explains a lot.
If you undercut everyone, they will undercut competitors with the same strategy
If a cheap competitor undercuts a cheap competitor margins will tend to zero
If a competitor is pricing at zero and you need to undercut them, you will operate at a loss
Eventually the company will either shut down, or be liquidated, its valuable assets (the existing contracts and list of customers) will be bought by competitor or Private Equity.
This is common in domains, thousands of registrars get acquired by a megacorp, see NewFold Digital.
So in essence, when the business proposition is being cheap, the natural consequence is the business dying and being sold for parts to a purchaser that will have to degrade the cost to value relationship that got the customers in the first place.
Consider a market with three suppliers.
Supplier A charges $12.00 and is widely regarded to be The Worst. Their only support is a broken chatbot with a tendency to lock your account at random and their UI is full of dark patterns that trigger hidden fees.
Supplier B charges $12.50 and is widely regarded to be a reasonable operator that will rarely screw you and offers basic no-frills service.
Supplier C charges $20.00 and is widely regarded to be a reasonable operator that will rarely screw you and offers a bunch of convenience features and integration with WordPress or something.
Which one are you going to choose? Maybe C if you want the convenience features, maybe B if you want the lower price, but never A, right?
Now suppose you're B and you want to pick a name that emphasizes that you have a lower price than C.
The market of people who have been burned and value support is <<< everyone else who is just getting stuff done and don’t care, or don’t have the money to care.
That's what the cynics always say, but do people actually choose A when B is available?
It's not just cars, look at landscaping, cleaning or handyman services, barber shops, etc. These are all commodities. How many coffee shops stay in business by providing poor service and bad coffee?
People mainly pick A when there isn't a B.
How? Magic? No, they operate at a loss for years, (especially if the loss is very marginal, which is the case for selling domains at 10$ instead of 11$).
The profit is pushed in the temporal scale into the future through investment, instead of needing to extract profit instantly at every moment.
This is known as price dumping and it occurs in thousands of industries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_dumping
I'm all for understanding what went down the drain, pondering on the name doesn't help much IMHO.
I'd love to get a bit more info on how CVC Capital Partners handle their purchases, what I get online is extremely generic and non descript.
These days I can't imagine using anything other than AWS or Cloudflare.
I can't believe this is real.
Big registrars can’t afford any support costs since they prefer to squeeze the price down as far as possible, and therefore they prefer to simply lose or outright drop any customer in case of any and all problems. Conversely, small registrars may charge more, but have better (i.e. actually existing, and sometimes even dedicated and personal) support for when things go wrong, and have a vested interest in keeping you as a customer.
A small registrar might also be so small as to know you personally, which will help monumentally against any social engineering attacks.
Full disclosure: I work at such a registrar, but you’re probably not in our target market.
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32095499
Especially because domain names are not expensive anyways, a dot com (gold standard of domains) has a cost to registrars of like 11 USD right now, so registrars can charge anywhere between 15 USD and 25 USD, maybe you can find one selling at cost at 11USD or at a loss with promotions even!
But we are talking about saving 10$/year? That's less than 1$/mo. Trying to save 1$/mo is strictly in the terrain of underfunding your business, if you can't allocate enough funds so that Domain costs become a non-issue (and a provider like namecheap stops being attractive) then you will fail in a thousand ways, it's not just about domains at this point.
I agree in principle, but businesses commonly own more than one domain name, so the costs add up.
Your water bill costs more than this. Your toilet rolls cost more than this. And certainly a cleaner costs more than this, if you have a business premise.
But as I have written elsewhere¹, my company’s home page isn’t even available in English. You are most likely not in our target market.
1. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21437951>
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45118689
I moved out of there a while ago.
Moved to namecheap. Honestly, thry've been great to me, for years, but now I'm worried. The reality is that for all the efforts we put into reducing SPOFs, scaling, and being ready for the inevitable, the registrar system is now a single point chokehold that provides serious risk.
This is especially disheartening when you remember OpenSRS. It explicitly wasn't supposed to be, and wasn't desgned to be that way.
In the last few years they managed to destroy that reputation though.
Since then, my domain's reputation has been affected, and I often get security warnings when trying to access my own website through my company's VPN.
Namecheap simply informed me that it had been a mistake, but the damage was already done, and the issue still persists.
OK, but seriously, if my domain name vanishes all the things I won't be able to log into are insane, and if I were selling goods as a company it would be even worse.
I repeat. This was on Reddit. Consider what credibility there might be.
As far as I recall, Namecheap was based in Eastern Europe - as an Eastern European, I can tell you that I would never put anything important in an Eastern European company! Their new Spaceship offshoot is lipstick on a pig, literally.
Cloudflare is also not a good choice - you have no support! Porkbun may seem cool, but I'm not impressed as they lack some basic features such as profiles, let's say.
Thankfully (and scarily) they did the same as you -- they removed the 2FA for me via chat so I could log in and reset it :D
I only have one domain left in there now...
Try it for yourself, use their website to explore some domains you might like and watch them register from right under you and price gouge.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_surrounding_GoDa...
Admittedly any company will have it's share of controversies over time. But their history speaks to a value system that doesn't square with some of the foundational values of the internet (openness, decentralisation, user empowerment) imo.