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Comment by orion138 | Hacker News Reader

Not the main point of the article, but the author’s comments on Gandi made me wonder:

What registrar do people recommend in 2025?

I have moved to porkbun.

I have built a registrar in the past and have a lot of arcane knowledge about how they work. Just need to figure out a way to monetize!

Like I frequently¹ advise²:

Don’t look to large, well-known registrars. I would suggest that you look for local registrars in your area. The TLD registry for your country/area usually has a list of the authorized registrars, so you can simply search that for entities with a local address.

Disclaimer: I work at such a small registrar, but you are probably not in our target market.

1. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32095499>

2. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32507784>

I miss the days when Network Solutions had a permanent option to switch/sign-up with a PGP key, binding all future communications and change requests to it.

I forget how they handled key expiration/revocation...

Since you asked, I use Cloudflare for my registrar. I can’t really say if it’s objectively better or worse than anybody else, but they seemed like a good choice when Google was in the process of shutting off their registry service.

I use Cloudflare for everything I can and then currently use Namecheap for anything it doesn't support. I haven't tried Porkbun mostly because I'm okay with what I have already.

After Google ditched Domains I moved to Route53. I guess the only downside is that it doesn't handle some TLDs?

What you want from a registrar is to keep existing for many years and resilience to social engineering, and AWS seems like the next best thing to Google which you famously can't even talk to for a social engineering attempt. I expect AWS account management to be almost as good as Gaia, but don't really know how hard social engineering is.

I recently had to bail on Gandi. I had a special requirement, being Canadian, in that I didn't want to use a registrar in the USA. I found a Canadian registrar that seemed to have the technical stuff reasonably worked out (many don't) and had easy to understand pricing:

https://grape.ca/

Been with namecheap for as long as I can remember. Hasn’t changed at all. Still great.

Distribute your domain across 2, better 3 registrars, so if one does something stupid with your domains at least the others keep working.

Pork bun is my favorite.

It seems to be what Rachel decided on.

Must be other good ones? Somewhat prefer something in the UK (but have been using Gandi so its not essential).

Gandi prices went way way up. I've been using Porkbun too.

I don't know about the UK, but if you want to keep things in Europe then I can vouch for Netim in France.

INWX in Germany also seems well regarded but I haven't used them.

I've been on Namecheap for years but I'm ready to move just because they refuse to support dynamic AAAA records. How's Porkbun on that front?

Not sure, I use dnsimple for dns and wrote my own little service to update my A record, no ip6 in my corner of the world so have not checked for AAAA record support.

Use AWS Route53?

Any feedback on CF one?

CF sells domains at cost so you're not going to beat them on price, but the catch is that domains registered through them are locked to their infrastructure, you're not allowed to change the nameservers. They're fine if you don't need that flexibility and they support the TLDs you want.

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