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Comment by idorosen | Hacker News Reader

What registrar do people recommend these days for domain registration that's (more?) secure against domain theft attack vectors? Namecheap? Gandi? MarkMonitor? One of the cloud providers?

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I use and like Gandi. If you're worried about social engineering though, I'd probably go Google since they would be the hardest for someone to get ahold of.

I had my domain taken over while on Gandi. Interestingly they didn't do it via customer support, but instead were directly in contact with Gandi's legal department. Their legal guys approved the request/order without thinking to actually verify anything at all. Funnily enough, I had way more trouble getting my domain back than the people who stole it.

As far as I can tell, Google, Cloudflare and Namecheap are really the only guys in town that don't fall for stupid shit.

How long ago was this, roughly?

I've heard of past concerns about some of Gandi's internal procedures and even ignoring that, they've been acquired by a venture capital firm of sorts.

> I'd probably go Google since they would be the hardest for someone to get ahold of.

If customers can't reach the support centre, neither can scammers.

I can vouch for Gandi.

> I'd probably go Google since they would be the hardest for someone to get ahold of

An excellent case of "it's a feature, not a bug".

Namecheap is excellent and they have solid YubiKey support. Plus whois privacy proxy service included for free.

I've been concerned about NameCheap since this alleged incident occurred

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18063667

I heard google's lack of customer support is a feature when it comes to security.

It's a meme, but not exactly true. Google has terrible customer support. And has great security. But the great security actually comes from actually very good policies, and have a fantastic "advanced protection" service for people who are targeted.

I was targeted extensively and purely from social engineering they managed to trick: A) Apple B) Amazon (AWS) C) Gandi

Into handing over my accounts. Companies that stood up fine and were targeted:

A) Google B) Namecheap C) Cloudflare D) Facebook

Cloudflare has the best domain prices. They sell domains at wholesale rates.

“Only domains Active at Cloudflare via a Full setup (Cloudflare hosts the authoritative DNS) are eligible for Cloudflare Registrar”[0]

[0] https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/36001991067...

Do you consider that a negative?

They don't say it's negative, but it's certainly a limitation.

MarkMonitor for businesses and large organizations. They have a lot of resources that can work with your legal team if domain legal issues crop up. They also have a legal presence in multiple countries that require you to have a local presence to get their ccTLD. They can super-lock domains so that if someone manages to change the root servers, they can instantly change it back unless a processes that you define is followed.

> They can super-lock domains so that if someone manages to change the root servers, they can instantly change it back unless a processes that you define is followed.

If you're referring to registry lock, that's not exactly how it works. It prevents said changes in the first place rather than merely reverting them; all changes have to go through an enhanced, manually verified, known-human-to-known-human change process. This is what e.g. google.com uses.

They sell a service that goes beyond registry lock.

Do you have a link with more info?

Currently using Porkbun, no complaints thus far.

I don't think MarkMonitor is for casual domain owners.

You can use mark monitor if you want to spend a bajillion dollars. They are meant for big brands with big budgets.

I like NameSilo.

Cheap prices, simple non bloated interface, free privacy, and 2FA.

50:50 split between Porkbun and Gandi.

iwantmyname is solid, been using them for over 5 years.

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