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A namecheap bug got my domain suspended: https://captnemo.in/blog/2026/05/05/namecheap-whois/

I'm planning to migrate out.

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

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.

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 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.

>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.

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 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.

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.

Ohhh so that’s why I got those price increases emails. Yay. What are some good alternatives?

And well, business goes down.

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).

>namecheap purchased by private equity CVC in 2025 for $1.5B

Ahhh crap, there goes the company down the toilet. And they were the place I trusted to buy my domain names from.

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).

Who did you move to? I used to use google domains before they sold and and am not sure who is decent anymore

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.

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.

I've used porkbun.com for a bit. I've had no complaints, and at least when I looked initially their prices were pretty good.

I went GoDaddy -> Namecheap -> Cloudflare.

Used to use Porkbun but now I just use Cloudflare because everything goes straight there anyway.

I've always used Joker. Never heard anything bad about them or had any problems.

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.

I have used NameSilo for a long time. Not fancy, but no complaints.

Porkbun. Do not go with Cloudflare, even if their at-cost pricing 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. Last I checked (admittedly not recently) they were also incapable of holding premium domain names, which may or may not matter to you.

mix of Cloudflare, porkbun and Dynadot (for olds other two doesn't support).

inwx.com, gandi.net

porkbun

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.

If you have still X years remaining of a registered domain, do those years move as well or do you lose them, if you move registrar?

These companies may as well be citing Ron Swanson's park ordinances for all the relevance those regulations have to their data collection demands.

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.

Cloudflare is pretty affordable and it seems unlikely to be bought by PE

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.

Hetzner, OVHcloud are decent European options. I migrated to them after geopolitical risks with US providers got too high. No problems so far.

Porkbun has been good to me.

infomaniak.ch is swiss, and (relatively) good. Lacking features overall (though their domain+DNS is solid), but at least no bullshit like this

Dynadot. Over a decade without issues.

What do you mean, can you entrust one domain with multiple registrars?

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.

Was the name actually available? Or were they reselling a domain they owned?

>I'm an Iranian---which is something you have no choice in

Weird argument. Given they're in the US, not complying with US sanctions on Iran isn't an option either.

This is likely due to government sanctions rather than anything the registrar had control over.

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.

Yes - domain registries should be run by the government.

DNS etc can be run by third parties

How would that help? The government could still block domains registered by people in adversarial countries.

Personally I would not want the US government controlling and micro-managing who gets to have a .com domain.

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 a country was directly attacking the city were ~1k of my employees live[1], I wouldn't want to continue to do business with them either.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30507103

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namecheap#Termination_of_servi...

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.

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)?

Mh, if anything, this would make me want to do business with them more.

Now what?