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.
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.
so costs need to go down (-human support + ai automation)
and prices go up (they increased i think .com 3 times this year alone)
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
1) The registrar want to increase its margins.
2) The registry upstream increased their price. For .com, Verisign agreement with ICANN 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.
"WARNING: This site has been known to cause a mind blowing experience. We recommend you prepare yourself mentally and if possible be sitting down. Side effects may include saving money, letting out a chuckle, and sporadic oinking."
Domain related: I regret getting a .io domain for my email and website; with the price increases, it's not far from $100/year. I'm looking to move from Namecheap to Porkbun and to move to a .com domain.
The first is a vampire looking to take what was publicly or even privately owned, extract every last dollar and leave the shell with the debt of buying the next victim.
Private Ownership is Valve or Porkbun - The people running the business want to make a profit but not to their own or their customers determent.
I mean not always, but that does happen and that's what you hear about.
People mean "acquired by a Private Equity firm". You can learn what one of those is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_equity_firm
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.
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.
Most websites don't use CAA records at all. The records can only narrow what CAs are acceptable down from the end user's root trust store, they can't add new CAs to it. And CloudFlare is typically in charge of managing its customers' certificates, so they add CAA records for their own CAs.
If you don't trust CF to manage your certs, you are not in their target market and generally should not use their products.
https://developers.cloudflare.com/ssl/reference/certificate-...
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).
but "numbers guys" say no, we need squeeze profits short term..
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.
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.
Also found this list: https://www.forbes.com/advisor/business/software/best-domain...
Might be relevant for others looking for alternatives
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...
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.
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.
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.
The only downside is that they use Cloudflare DNS behind the scenes, so when Cloudflare goes down, your website goes down too unless you use third-party DNS.
You can always use third-party DNS if that's what you wish to do. That should be a supported configuration with ~any registrar (and if it isn't, avoid them).
You can run your own (first-party!) authoritative nameserver(s) for your domain, if you want to, and you can even do this on hardware that you can see and kick. A nameserver isn't particularly hard to set up in a sensible fashion.
However it happens, eliminating Cloudflare's DNS from the equation is easy. The TLD nameservers (for .com or .net or whatever) will cheerfully direct resolvers towards whatever nameserver(s) you specified as part of your domain registration.
After that, when Cloudflare DNS dies on any random Tuesday afternoon, your domain will still work. (Maybe it won't work for those using Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1, but those people may have bigger issues on that particular Tuesday.)
Edit: I feel that it's pertinent to point out one of these experiences that were particularly bad. About two years ago I tried to register an IDN (internationalized domain name) with them. The registration succeeded according to their interface. Money was deducted. The domain did not appear in my inventory. My support ticket took several days to receive attention and was just closed with the almost arrogant response, "you probably did some mistake", with no further information or support. My second support ticket, too, took several days to get a response, and it was then revealed that the problem was that they weren't capable of registering IDNs under that specific TLD, for unknown reasons. That support ticket was also closed without allowing me to respond, so I had to open a third ticket just to get my money back.
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.
Oh, 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.
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.
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.
I’ve used them exclusively since 2011 and it’s been nothing but wonderful
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.
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 repeat. This was on Reddit. Consider what credibility there might be.
Account of 14 years, always paid from the cards in the same name. Can't think of any valid reason to do this, hope they lose most of their customers and go bankrupt.
OK, but seriously, if my domain name vanishes all the things I won't be able to log into are insane. Over the last thirty years, many many more "little people" have come to rely a lot more heavily (and immediately) on their domains working.
DNS etc can be run by third parties
Besides, which government do you want to run .com domains
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?
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.
- Cloudflare
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.
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.
I've been waiting for the "porkbun screwed me" stories, but haven't seen any yet.
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.
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.
I can't believe this is real.
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.