Namecheap just seized and disabled all my domains
reddit.comNamecheap gave my account to an unverified third party
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
A namecheap bug got my domain suspended: https://captnemo.in/blog/2026/05/05/namecheap-whois/
I'm planning to migrate out.
Namecheap turned me into a newt
Did you get better?
did you get better?
Burn them!
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.
So what company are people switching to? Namecheap used to be a reasonable choice -oh wait there is another thread with that discussion
- Porkbun (see the thread below https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50144164)
- Cloudflare
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).
edit: I remember now – I could't even see pricing easily on their domains page and I still can't. If I am picking a domain registrar I'd rather pick just a domain registrar that does normal domain regisrar things (and preferably nothing else, or not much).
Porkbun is using surveillance tech to combat fraud now so I would be careful[0]
Something to take note is domain transfers between Porkbun accounts requires ID verification now [1].
[1]: https://kb.porkbun.com/article/72-how-to-push-a-domain-into-...
Cloudflare banned 8chan and Kiwifarms for political reasons.
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.
I could see Cloudflare randomly deciding that my single-employee company domain name needs an enterprise plan in a few years from now.
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.
Right, their main money maker is $150k enterprise plans you gave them a large amount of leverage to declare you suddenly require.
Not really. I've had about 50 domains with them for the last few years and have never seen them reach out do to something like that.
But they can do it. And they have done it to some people. So you shouldn't give them that power.
How is that any different than any other domain registrar though? There's nothing stopping you from just moving the domain to another provider if it's a problem.
Compared to the Namecheap and GoDaddy stories, Cloudflare has been a gift to use.
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".
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.
You clearly gave your partners more access than necessary and the loss the result of your own foolishness.
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.
I have good experiences with both porkbun and INWX as well. INWX could indeed use a UX update.
I used to use TransIP.nl and while they are still good, they’ve gotten expensive over the last few years.
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 switched to Hover. Part of TUCOWS. Yes, that one [0].
[0] Tucows, which stands for "The Ultimate Collection Of Winsock Software"
I’ve seen many tucows domains which just stop being published for no apparent reason and it takes a support request to get them working again
I've used them for like 15 years
Amazon Route 53, Cloudflare and NearlyFreeSpeech
S&Ps use MarkMonitor.
+1 For Amazon Route 53 - one of the services that they don't nickel and dime you on.
Very surprised they don’t charge you per GB of DNS traffic and per million DNS requests
Yeah me too - they charge for name servers but I figured out after a while that Linode did the same thing for none of the cost.
But for domain registrations alone it's fine.
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.
is not Amazon Route 53 more expensive than Cloudflare?
Cloudflare requires you use their name servers
I like Hover.com a lot.
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.
i use joker.com and gigahost.no for .no
CloudFlare
Then you need a new username
Dynadot
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.
Tell that to the banks, alarm companies, etc that do the same thing :-/
I just always use a plausible but false and unique answer, which I just keep track of in my password manager.
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.
mother's maiden name: 14t&7--ghv&32@/apER;Aa0)/90sIs
Good luck reading that out loud over the phone to technical support if you get locked out of your account.
Just since 2015? Also, thanks, now I feel old.
joker.com
They have been around forever. I registered my first domain from them sometime during the early internet era.
Porkbun
Yeah, I'm not waiting around for Namecheap to screw me, I'm moving to porkbun. They do all the stuff Namecheap does for me now.
I've been waiting for the "porkbun screwed me" stories, but haven't seen any yet.
There are in that very Reddit thread though.
Honestly, so far Porkbun haven't fucked me yet but sad to see them going down the same route as namecheap
Are there any decent non-US based domain provider remaining at all?
Hover
EasyDNS
internet.bs
>I'm planning to migrate out.
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.
+1, unfortunately.
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.
> Namecheap banned a few domain names purely based on an ambiguous tweet that got 6 likes
I can't believe this is real.
Hilarious because namecheap is the number 1 provider of lookalike domains that we see in our incident response actions.
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
They used to be great, I had 30+ domains with them and support used to be great. They got acquired by PE and went downhill.
Some of us are old enough to remember the great GoDaddy-Namecheap exodus!
These days I can't imagine using anything other than AWS or Cloudflare.
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.
These apply to literally all businesses in a competitive marketplace.
Only in a commodity market
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.
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 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, friendly, and great, cue enshittification. Migrated, as one does to gandi - who of course gets a new owner, and becomes horrid.
Moved to namecheap. Honestly, they'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 designed to be that way.
They're the same trash, tho.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45118689
I moved out of there a while ago.
Same here, migrated off of them shortly after they announced there first price hike.
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.
> But we are talking about saving 10$/year? That's less than 1$/mo.
I agree in principle, but businesses commonly own more than one domain name, so the costs add up.
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.
namecheap purchased by private equity CVC in 2025 for $1.5B
so costs need to go down (-human support + ai automation)
and prices go up (they increased i think .com 3 times this year alone)
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.
1: https://ledger.worseonpurpose.com/brands/new-balance "Why Approved" section
yes, it's 2026, people use ai.
I don't see anything on namecheap in there.
> Is there a directory of private equity acquisitions?
CrunchBase is usually accurate:
https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/namecheap#financials
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.
Thanks for explaining how markets work. Not really a response to the OPs complaint.
Ohhh so that’s why I got those price increases emails. Yay. What are some good alternatives?
I've been very happy with Porkbun. https://porkbun.com
I enjoy the warning in the footer:
"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.
I moved my domains to Porkbun some years ago when Google sold their domain stuff to Squarespace. Absolutely no headaches, and the one time i got double-charged after an API error during checkout, it was solved within 15 minutes with a human. I recommend them a lot.
Do you know if they support dynamic DNS? I self host most of my stuff and I have a dynamic IP at home
Yes, in that they have an API for their DNS service. It's supported by ddns-updater.
Really wish they would allow creating limited scope API keys though. You can only limit keys by domain, not by action or record which would be ideal.
Same here. Recently migrated quite a few domains from Namecheap to Porkbun and it only took a matter of minutes.
Yep I moved all namecheap and godaddy to porkbun.
I also moved over and have been very happy.
Moved over after Gandi’s acquisition by PE and then price hikes. Hope Porkbun stays legit for at least another decade.
And porkbun, a seemingly privately owned company, isn't private equity?
Private Equity vs Private Ownership
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.
> The first is a vampire
I mean not always, but that does happen and that's what you hear about.
Is there a good example of a private equity buyout which wasn't based on that strategy?
My understanding is that there are private equity firms who have legitimate strategy and competency with turning around struggling companies.
Good examples have come up in fast food industry like Arby's and Buffalo Wild Wings.
Last paragraph on this article:
https://www.fershman.com/articles/private-equity%E2%80%99s-s...
This "vampire the company into a debt spiral" strategy is definitely not what happened in these cases, though we can argue about whether the end product is better or worse off for it. I'm certainly not lining up at Arby's, Dunkin, or Buffalo Wild Wings. Still, I think that question is essentially irrelevant to the topic at hand: this is a private equity firm that's legitimately trying to make the company healthier on business fundamentals.
Not in the sense that anyone means when they say private equity?
You mean how it's always used post hoc (ie. "ah ha! the company was owned by private equity! you should've known!") or as a generic kneejerk reaction, neither of which has any rigorous criteria for what the "bad" sort of private equity is?
> the "bad" sort of private equity
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
Yeah people generally mean PE investment firms that are in the business of moving around and sucking up companies for short terms and stripping them to squeeze all the money out and then moving on to the next one. Not simply that a company’s equity is privately held, not publicly traded.
Yes.
Which Private Equity company do you think owns them?
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.
Wait, you consider that abusive? I have only used NFSN as a registrar for two decades. Always had hosting and DNS managed elsewhere.
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.
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.
Porkbun. Cloudflare if you don't mind being locked into using them for DNS too.
Id caution against using Cloudflare for DNS. They rewrite your CAA record so multiple other CAs can sign certs on your domains. It's non-obvious unless you query your own CAA record
Source/writeup somewhere? The amount of domains that use CF must be staggering, so if this was a real threat being leveraged in the wild you'd think it would be an epidemic no??
It's not a threat.
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-...
Thank you!
Many people use cloudflare for DNS. Few people use cloudflare for domain name purchases as that feature is much newer.
OP specifically said "using Cloudflare for DNS..." ? I wasn't talking about domain name registration and don't think OP was either?
Well and dns service is reasonably easy to switch
I've been using DNSimple for 15 years without issue.
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.
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.
>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.
Oof, that'll do it.
I'll have to move providers.
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).
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.
yep, social approval and good faith will always get you constant business (word of mouth - recommendations).
but "numbers guys" say no, we need squeeze profits short term..
To that end, Network Solutions is still around
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.
Been using Dreamhost for over 30 years, never had any complaints, I have over 15 domains with them. Not the cheapest, but they have been steady.
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.
Who did you move to? I used to use google domains before they sold and and am not sure who is decent anymore
Porkbun has been great.
I've been using joker.com for ~25 years - solid registrar.
I'm not sure which name I hate more - porkbun or joker. It looks like I'll be picking one of them though.
joker has some positive meanings too, like in card games.
porkbun is chinese food. not my favorite. to much dough...
Gross racist stereotype? Well done bee
sorry what? i don't get your point
- Pork buns aren't only Chinese
- Pork bun (the food) isn't always too much dough (significantly supplier dependent, you've apparently not had good ones - yelp is for this)
- Jokers in card games aren't positive, they're wild
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cha_siu_bao
they are primarily of chinese origin. i know them from living in china and travelling in asia. how is that a stereotype? and more importantly, what's gross about it? or how is it racist? i didn't say anything about chinese people, nor did i claim that all chinese eat porkbuns. that would be a possibly racist stereotype.
sure, it's a generic name, and you could name anything that is a bun with pork a porkbun. but that doesn't negate what i said.
i have lived and traveled to many countries on four continents. but apparently i have not travelled enough to ever come across porkbuns that are not the chinese kind. apologies for my ignorance.
i suppose german Speckknödel could translate to porkbun too. my bad.
in most cards games i know, the joker is a positive wild card, because you can use it as a fill in for any other card you are missing. how is that not positive? and the goal here is to point out that a positive association for joker exists. the existence of negative associations does not negate that.
Mythic beasts
Not currently using any of their services, but I’d trust Mythic Beasts a very great deal based on previous dealings.
i can vouch for porkbun and cloudflare
Same! Both are great
Also Porkbun. I really can’t fault them.
Damn I didn't even know about them. Thanks for sharing and thanks to OP for this post. Gonna move out of namecheap asap.
Also found this list: https://www.forbes.com/advisor/business/software/best-domain...
Might be relevant for others looking for alternatives
Dynadot
infomaniak
Internet.bs
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.
GoDaddy has had so many scandals I wouldn't trust them if they were the last registrar on earth. To this day they engage in blatant domain name front running https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_name_front_running
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.
I’m pretty sure it’s an American company. They have or had employees in Ukraine though, but that doesn’t make them an eastern european company.
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
I only have one domain left in there now...
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.
Haha, god damn it. I just got done getting all the way off Squarespace after Google Domains pushed me there. It's just a pity not everything is supported by Cloudflare. Okay, anyway, the solution if you're stuck with Namecheap for the moment seems to be to proactively do whatever this ID verification is. Does anyone know? If anyone has managed to do this proactively then I'd love to follow their instructions.
They’ve been bought by PE, so expect worse.
Same thing that’s happening with BitWarden.
I just moved my email domain off to PorkBun.
Move NOW before it becomes a problem. It WILL knock on your door too. Talking from experience, had my whole very small one-man business shutdown over night by Site5 (hosting) when I was a student, sent me into debt trying to keep my customers, and I had to shut it down.
Move off of the companies that obviously don’t care to the ones that might care a little bit (no guarantees this doesn’t happen to porkbun either though).
Maybe OP committed a crime? E.g. being born in a country Namecheap doesn't like
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.
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
Normally yes, but we are talking about Cloudflare here, and their products are always of excellent quality.
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.
+1 for Porkbun
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.
But for end-users not using CF DNS... if the domain used third-party DNS, wouldn't that be enough? Since the TLD servers keep their own mapping of authoritative DNS servers for every domain, it's not asking CF to resolve DNS for your domain.
Yes.
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.)
Have you dealt with their customer service? Namecheap also seems fine to me, but I have also never been in a situation like OP’s.
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've always used Joker. Never heard anything bad about them or had any problems.
I was a Joker customer for more than 20 years, since the early 2000s, but recently switched because of a series of compounding bad experiences in just the past 3 years on top of their unusually high prices.
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.
Same here. This is the first time I've ever heard anyone else even mention them!
I went GoDaddy -> Namecheap -> Cloudflare.
I have used NameSilo for a long time. Not fancy, but no complaints.
Used to use Porkbun but now I just use Cloudflare because everything goes straight there anyway.
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 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.
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
What domain registrar offers ordinary commercial terms? No binding arbitration. No right of self-help by the registrar. Terms no worse than if you leased a truck.
There's a reason it's called Namecheap not Namesafe.
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.
Not sure why you're flagged, very reasonble
Slowly migrating my domains to Cloudflare as they near expiration. Namecheap's quality and service has downgraded so much in the last several years. It's no longer worth it with the pricing updates.
Cloudflare has been pretty reliable so far. I've been using their services since the beginning.
Me too, but I am struggling with my sole .sh domain. Other than that I have been happy with Cloudflare.
Namecheap has a lousy alert system for expiring domains.. I lost 2 and moved over to porkbun
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.
This has been standard for DNS registration since the 80s.
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.
Because you didn't provide a phone number and a government ID? All domain names are legally required to have this level of verification by ICANN rules, but it's only enforced by random checks. Also any contract with someone whose identity is completely unknown is effectively void, since there's no way to prove the needful in court.
It is strange to see, in this thread, people supporting (not having any problem with) NC's actions to ban everyone who had registered from Russia when Russia attacked Ukraine, unprovoked. By those standards companies everywhere ought to ban people from USA for Trump alone and in this case they actually democratically elected the guy and didn't rise up in arms to overthrow him :-) No, then we will talk degrees and nuances and apples and oranges will join the table. For a lot of NC customeres from rest of the world, at that time, it was a wake-up call. Their migrating domains to elsewhere had noithing to do with solidarity or any such thing with Russian users who got caught up in that crossfire. Yet another beautiful example of some customer hostile actions are more equal than other customer hostile actions as long it's not aimed against certain geographies.
This gave me the final kick to finally move away from Namecheap
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.
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?
Yes. You usually get +1 year to existing expiration date of your domain, at least this is how it works for .com, .us and few other tlds I have.
Porkbun has treated me right for years. Will continue to use them
One time they randomly took my domain offline because they thought my contact details weren't verified but they were. Had to contact support
I just put homeless on my address field. No issues.
I have dozens of domains with them and this was the first time I ever had this issue, it was definitely a bug in their system
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.
Was the name actually available? Or were they reselling a domain they owned?
Hey, reddalo, have this $foobar at $19.95!
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.
That was it, exactly.
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.
And NEVER use an email address on some domain/service for administration of that domain/service.
Cloudflare is good but does not support all extensions
Not an option for personal domains or small companies, but MarkMonitor is a great choice for bigger companies or critical domains.
Between 2014 and 2018, Namecheap was a solid provider, and my experiences back then were consistently positive.
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.
What are good alternatives to namecheap?
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.
Have you ever contacted their support? I'm thinking about switching to Hetzner.
Hetzner and other German companies are NOT known for their good service.
Hetzner support is terrible. Days waiting for a canned response that clearly shows they didn't read the ticket request at all.
Facebook/Apple/Amazon/Netflix/NewYorkTimes/Google/LocalGym/CloudFlare/Microsoft too
Dynadot. Over a decade without issues.
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
Could they also get bought by private equity? It seems a lot of things get bought by this
Short of sanctioned jurisdictions pretty much anything can get purchased. You just get a local corporate lawyer to help straighten things out
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.
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’d never do a domain name check there again.
Front running is why I only check using https://domainr.com/
Well, if a deal sounds too cheap to be true ...
Does this mean we should not always entrust our domains with only one registrar?
What do you mean, can you entrust one domain with multiple registrars?
I meant for people with multiple domains.
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.
Friends don't let friends use namecheap.
Nearlyfreespeech.net is the only safe DNS provider in my estimation
I’ve used them exclusively since 2011 and it’s been nothing but wonderful
archived, no login wall: https://nonograph.com/namecheap-just-seized-and-disabled-all...
They requested presentation of a phone number and ID, so this sounds like info harvesting (for laundering / resale).
This is an anonymous post on Reddit.
I repeat. This was on Reddit. Consider what credibility there might be.
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
>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.
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.
That is just so stupid...
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.
This is likely due to government sanctions rather than anything the registrar had control over.
Seizing tge domain to auction it at x100 the price?
No, I don't think so.
Yeah, but their treatment was terrible.
There Oughta Be a Law.
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.
This was confusing since Namecheap used to be a perfect company.
It turns out it was solid to MBA, PE bros [0].
This explains the detoration of services.
[0]: https://www.wsj.com/business/deals/cvc-strikes-1-5-billion-d...
Same here, one scam-like email to just one of the connected addresses (renewals go everywhere), 1 week to comply, domains updated Friday night, "risk and compliance" who are supposed to react in 12-24 are still thinking about it.
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.
It shouldn't even be possible to seize a domain in the first place. Too often it ends up hurting legitimate actors.
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.
Yes - domain registries should be run by the government.
DNS etc can be run by third parties
Nominet does yet they outsource.
Besides, which government do you want to run .com domains
UN of course
this is not even funny.
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 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.
So, ICANN?
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.
If you still did business with them after this, it's your own fault and you deserve everything they're doing to you:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30504812
(Before reacting to the headline, please read at least some of the discussion.)
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.
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.
Explain why this theoretical argument would be wrong.
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.
Mh, if anything, this would make me want to do business with them more.
Now what?
yep, this was the thing that stopped me from using them