Our domain was abruptly blocked by our registrar this morning. Our NOC team and myself tried to get in touch with them and they tell us "Contact our legal". Even I could not get in touch with anyone beyond their phone operator. The domain was restored, but as DNS takes time to restore, we are still facing issues. They later claimed there were abuse complaints about Zoho.com emails (which is our personal email service with millions of free and paid users). We received a total of 3 complaints from them and two of them have been acted upon and one is under investigation.
Once we dig our way out of this, we will find ways make sure no one takes down our domain again this way.
I work in this industry and it's a very clear separation between bulk registrars and those that maintain fewer but high value domain names. The latter usually give you a personal contact person to call and work proactively to deal with threats to companies' domain names and trade marks. I don't think I have ever heard of a domain being abruptly suspended by such a registrar.
The cost is usually 5x-10x that of the cheapest registrars so there is naturally a balance to be struck, and as I work in this industry I might be a bit biased. However the damage when waiting on the TTL when registries update NS records sounds very substantial when they first suspend and later restore a domain name in what sound as a very reckless behavior.
I did some work for a client in 2017 who was starting a cryptocurrency business. This involved buying a domain name for him to transfer to him later.
Well in 2018 there was some internal strife in his business that ended with a lawsuit being started. The opposing party started sending subpoenas to Namecheap asking for all information from 2018 onwards in relation to his account. What ended up happening was they released all of my information about my purchases, domains, personal information(anonymized credit card info, my actual physical address, information about my other unrelated clients domains, etc.)... going back to the start of my account.. several years worth of data prior to 2018. All clearly out of scope of the subpoena they were served.
Not only that, Namecheap never notified me of this.. in violation of their own privacy policy. They're supposed to notify their customers of the release of their information in relation to subpoenas by email or certified mail. Instead I found out much later from my previous client when he was given a copy of all of my information. And presumably his opposing parties in the crypto space were also given all of my information.
Seems kind of messed up to release all of that erroneously, without warning... especially to shady people in the crypto space.. you know, with people getting kidnapped over this stuff.
TL;DR Namecheap will drop your info, even if you paid to protect it as soon as they're given a single demand letter. And they won't stop at just giving up the info that's asked for (with 0 fight and 0 notification to you) there's a chance they'll release ALL of your account information.