- Namecheap
- Cloudflare
- Route 53 (if on AWS)
Any others?
I am fine with the identity verification, but their ticketing system seems to have sent all of my e-mail to their spam box, because they would never respond. I attempted opening tickets explaining the e-mail situation, but they wouldn't listen. In the end, I gave up and let them deactivate the account.
Moved to Porkbun, purchased the exact same domain (no KYC required!), and have been a happy user of their API for about two years now. They also have much more lax requirements for API usage compared to Namecheap. Porkbun also supports WebAuthn and logging in with a security key. It's overall a much nicer service than Namecheap.
They support credit/debit cards, bitcoin, and Paypal. I went with Namecheap especially because of their seamless payment method, Used to struggle at times paying for my domains with Gandi, etc.
Namecheap payment system works just fine.
If you are in Germany donaindiscount24.com is good option too.
i am guessing they are milking their existing customers who don't notice or don't have the knowhow or resources to move their domains, and once those wise up to that they will lose a lot of them
apart from prices their operation didn't seem to change after the sale. although i only have a few domains so i probably didn't interact with them enough to notice anything else
E: https://registry.terraform.io/providers/cullenmcdermott/pork...
Not sure if it works though
You: "their billing works just fine" [then talking about payments, when I wasn't talking about payments but billing, "The process of sending an invoice (a bill) to customers for goods or services" -Wikipedia]
They have their billing for domains and products spread over several pages, there is not one place in the UI where they have all payments/billing combined, they don't have PDFs as I've stated and they don't sent invoices by email. Their billing UI is horrendous.
As an example; I had a dedicated server that I was leasing that I wanted to upgrade, the sales tech noticed that the plan I was currently on had been retired/replaced and credited my account with difference of what I had payed vs the new payment tier which amounted to six months of billing on the upgraded server. You can't really put a price on that kind of honesty!
I currently have some domains there (moved a few years ago from Godaddy), so is there something I need to worry about?
Auth-codes given on the website were expired and they took 2 weeks to give me the correct ones near the end of the registry period.
Support was extremely unresponsive. As this this was a side project I couldn't spent time on every day my domain went into quarantine for a short time. They answered 2 days before the end of the rental period, when requesting the auth codes ~2.5 weeks before.
Will never use them again after this experience.
Porkbun is my new home for most stuff and domains.lt for .lt which porkbun doesn't offer yet sadly.
The full thread is worth reading for more feedback on a range of registrars, particularly Namecheap: >>18086522
I strongly encourage people to only recommend domain registrars if they have verified that customer support won’t completely fuck you over when something goes wrong. Recommending registrars when you’ve only experienced the happy path is doing a disservice to the people you are trying to help out.
Went back on their contract obligations already, hiked prices, etc. Will be milked to death.
Best to consider them dead.
I think the HN consensus is that Cloudflare is a reasonably safe bet.
Without a doubt, Porkbun is one of the best. Their staff is knowledgeable, helpful and efficient. Highly recommend them.
If you take a look at:
https://www.domaindiscount24.com/en/about-us
You will see that Team Internet owns them as well. So I would personally bve on the fence if I would consider them good or not.
I have one on dynadot because Hover doesn't support the TLD, and the website sure is a lot more awkward.
seems like gandi didn't just multiply the prices but raised them exponentially.
beware of namecheap though. see >>42364240
Why didn't they proactively inform you that your service was retired and there was an alternative available?
It sounds like this must have been going on for a while to be worth 6 months of service in difference alone.
I left 1and1 close on 2 decades ago. If you consider this a story of good service, then I would suggest you try some other provider.
It's either full access to everything or, thanks to their support for creating a special account on request, only full access to DNS management.
Others might be good, but no idea who exactly, many small unknown companies in the list that could be either great or shitty.
Porkbun is great.
Namecheap is on my NO NO NO list, along with GoDaddy (and a bunch of others). Google Domains was also on this OH GOD NO list, but thankfully Google did the Google thing and killed the product.
I point my nameservers somewhere else and then forget about Namecheap for a year.
The only issue I experience with Namecheap are included redirects which have something like 90% uptime.
Route53 domains is seriously not needed for anything - just add zone in AWS and point your registrar to new NS.
As well as Gandi, DNSimple was another higher service one I really liked that went crazy on pricing. Agreed the registrar scene nowadays seems like a quite small "do use" list vs a couple of "don't use" :(.
If you're already hosting on AWS, then you'd only have one potentially hostile company to deal with instead of 2.
Route53's .com is $14/yr. So the three year price is $42.
Three year prices from a few registrars (there's so many pricing games the "per year" price is nonsense in most cases):
Cloudflare: $31.32 (-0.06)
GoDaddy: $46.93 (+15.55)
Namecheap: $41.24 (+9.86)
Namesilo: $51.87 (+20.49)
Porkbun: $29.61 (-1.77)
Route53: $42 (+10.46)
Spaceship: $28.98 (-2.40)
Not sure how that qualifies as "outrageously expensive".
You can make your own trade-offs, but for something that's literally the foundation of my online identity, business, etc I'm willing to pay $3.50/yr over wholesale for a company with a reputation, support, and generally aligned incentives.
You may choose to instead tie your online identity and business to someone charging less than cost to save half the price of a big mac a year. But I will find it hard to dig up much sympathy when we all find out _how_ they're planning to make money doing that.
The backup mail spool is nice too...
all in all - not the cheapest - but worth the piece of mind in my book :-D
But they seemed quite proactive on Twitter around the time people left Gandi en masse.
They were my second registrar. In fact more like the first "real" registrar, because before and in the 90s I registered via a one-man show.
But of course things can change. Let's see how this develops.