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.
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).
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.
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.
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)?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!”.
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.
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.
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)
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
[delayed]
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.
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).
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.
infomaniak
Internet.bs
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.
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)?
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.
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.
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.
+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.
I've always used Joker. Never heard anything bad about them or had any problems.
Same here. This is the first time I've ever heard anyone else even mention them!
porkbun
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.
This gave me the final kick to finally move away from Namecheap
What are good alternatives to namecheap?
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.
infomaniak.ch is swiss, and (relatively) good. Lacking features overall (though their domain+DNS is solid), but at least no bullshit like this
Porkbun has been good to me.
Cloudflare is pretty affordable and it seems unlikely to be bought by PE
Dynadot. Over a decade without issues.
Hetzner, OVHcloud are decent European options. I migrated to them after geopolitical risks with US providers got too high. No problems so far.
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.
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?
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