I've used Porkbun, Namecheap, and Gandi. Namecheap is my preferred. Porkbun is fine, Gandi I would prefer to not use again. I haven't tried Dynadot or Cloudflare's domains (but I love Cloudflare's DNS).
I was a founding member of a social enterprise startup which ended up in a position very similar to that.
In our case, we were lucky that we had two options to sell: (A) to an investor who wanted to pervert our mission, vision, and values for profit; or, (B) to a nonprofit who didn't have the money to give us more than a single paycheck or two worth of payoff for our equity.
If we had sold to Option A, a dozen of us would be wealthy right now. But the company we built would have been perverted into something unrecognizable.
In our case, to our founder's credit, we sold to Option B to keep the dream alive, but none of us became wealthy... and the nonprofit just shut down the company we founded only 2 years after the purchase (partly because the nonprofit didn't have the business savvy to make it sustainable). _Everyone_ was just laid off.
That means, our noble sacrifice only extended the lifetime of our noble vision by 2 years, and we're certainly feeling less good about it.
Because the alternative would have meant that a bunch of us bleeding hearts would have the economic freedom right now to do all sorts of good for untold decades to come.
So I'm just saying, sometimes you don't get to have good options and everything sucks, no matter how well-intentioned you are.
I am a gandi domain user.
I could up my account balance with a check and use their simple noscript http API to perform my domain operations (with curl).
Does it mean I will have to go raw IP email server? Aka, myname@[x.x.x.x] and myname@[IPv6:...], at least SPF is free here :)
Why I cannot find who did buy gandi??? what is happening???
> In February 2023, Gandi was acquired by Total Webhosting Solutions, forming a new brand, Your.Online. In June, the company announced drastic price increases, including a new monthly fee for mailboxes previously included for free.
One thing I really liked about Gandi was that they had a concept of Organizations, and users within those orgs, so we didn’t have to share a login within the org.
I’ve been moving my personal domains to Porkbun and Cloudflare, just to see which I like better. For domains at the company where I work I’d rather move them to Cloudflare, but they require that you use their DNS, and I haven’t yet felt like untangling how that will work with our AWS setup — we’re currently using Route53 and features there, including their certificate management and routing to specific ARNs.
Anyway, It’s a shame, because I was a big advocate for Gandi for a decade, and any time I could I always transferred domains there, for myself and the companies I worked for. In my digital life so far, Apple is the only one I’ve been able to stick with long-term. If they ever get broken up or if I get inexplicably banned, that one’s gonna hurt.
This has been my only issue with them so far. Realistically it's not likely to cause any problems for either my personal or professional situations since I prefer to use CF DNS. It's simply a missing feature.
If something happens that makes me reconsider their DNS product I'd likely transfer the domains, even if I could change nameservers.
It’s free, but there are times when it’s more convenient to point to someone else’s nameservers, and some people like to keep their DNS separate from their registrations as a “separation of powers” thing, but I’ve never seen the utility in that.
You cannot do this on Cloudflare without purchasing an Enterprise offering with SaaS features.
It's a very basic thing, allow CNAME to your subdomains... but nope.
So if you want to do this, you cannot use their DNS or Registrar.
I've never found a registrar that really felt like it was overall a good experience. It's definitely a "least bad" kind of market. The thing that bothers me the most about registrars is that they all have their own interfaces for stuff and it takes time to learn how to navigate to everything. So it makes it hard to try new ones.
Not directly domain related but they replied to me direct on something and great - humans there.
I have (or rather had) two Google Domains accounts, one for my own projects, and one with my work email address for work purposes. My work Google Domains account got banned for some imagined rules infraction. I sent an appeal with evidence, which was immediately denied. In case you are curious, the effect of being banned from Google Domains is: you are no longer able to use Google Domains at all, which means you are both unable to change your DNS settings, and unable to transfer your domains out. For all of the domains, I had to wait until they expired, wait for the grace period to expire, and re-register them on a new registrar, hoping nobody else got to them first.
After this experience, I decided it was not worth the risk to keep my personal domains on my personal Google account, so I transferred them out a few days later. I assume this was a bug, but as soon as I initiated the domain transfers, Google deleted all DNS records, which meant I had some non-trivial downtime on all of my websites while I got it all sorted out on a new registrar.
After both of these experiences, there is no way I would ever trust another domain to Google Domains.