Namecheap just seized and disabled all my domains
reddit.com
reddit.com
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
I'm planning to migrate out.
I've been waiting for the "porkbun screwed me" stories, but haven't seen any yet.
Are there any decent non-US based domain provider remaining at all?
That is the actual name of the company, not a statement on the scarcity of decent non-US based domain providers.
I just always use a plausible but false and unique answer, which I just keep track of in my password manager.
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.
Also my real mother maiden name is almost equally hard to comprehend for english-speaking tech support, so it doesn't make much of a difference.
It's plausible, hard to guess, and harder to social enginer than "It's a bunch of random letters and numbers."
- Porkbun doesn’t have this bullshit, how do they get by?
This isn't a good idea....
If using random text, there are many examples of, when asked to answer a secret question, telling the call centre droid "I just hit a few random keys for that one" and this being accepted.
You would do well to assume each call centre droid is a board kid more interested in his co-workers tits than your clever answers to security questions.
- Cloudflare
It's a great place to keep your domain names. Beyond that is up to you.
Compared to the Namecheap and GoDaddy stories, Cloudflare has been a gift to use.
The process is standardized.
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.
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).
[1]: https://kb.porkbun.com/article/72-how-to-push-a-domain-into-...
Sounds like a great way to prevent domain theft.
Kiwifarms is literally a doxxing site.
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 used to use TransIP.nl and while they are still good, they’ve gotten expensive over the last few years.
S&Ps use MarkMonitor.
But for domain registrations alone it's fine.
(And since the records are size-limited, per-GB is roughly the same thing.)
"Except for Alias A/AAAA records mapped to AWS services listed below, you incur charges for every DNS query answered by the Route 53 service."
[0] Tucows, which stands for "The Ultimate Collection Of Winsock Software"
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.
They also make no secret they have a political slant and use their power to enforce it - they will defend a piracy website from legal attacks but they will take down a neonazi website even without receiving any letter about it.
ok? Should we not be removing trash from the internet? A company shouldn't need to be told to take down hate speach.
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.
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.
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.
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 $20.00 and is widely regarded to be a reasonable operator that will rarely screw you and offers a bunch of convenience features and integration with WordPress or something.
Which one are you going to choose? Maybe C if you want the convenience features, maybe B if you want the lower price, but never A, right?
Now suppose you're B and you want to pick a name that emphasizes that you have a lower price than C.
The market of people who have been burned and value support is <<< everyone else who is just getting stuff done and don’t care, or don’t have the money to care.
Is this why Kias are the most popular cars in North America?
I was lazy and didn’t want to specify the constraints based on the specific economic good.
Cost is a factor, but not the only factor or even the dominant factor. Spirit Airlines is, after all, bankrupt.
That's what the cynics always say, but do people actually choose A when B is available?
It's not just cars, look at landscaping, cleaning or handyman services, barber shops, etc. These are all commodities. How many coffee shops stay in business by providing poor service and bad coffee?
People mainly pick A when there isn't a B.
How? Magic? No, they operate at a loss for years, (especially if the loss is very marginal, which is the case for selling domains at 10$ instead of 11$).
The profit is pushed in the temporal scale into the future through investment, instead of needing to extract profit instantly at every moment.
This is known as price dumping and it occurs in thousands of industries.
I'm all for understanding what went down the drain, pondering on the name doesn't help much IMHO.
I'd love to get a bit more info on how CVC Capital Partners handle their purchases, what I get online is extremely generic and non descript.
These days I can't imagine using anything other than AWS or Cloudflare.
I can't believe this is real.
Big registrars can’t afford any support costs since they prefer to squeeze the price down as far as possible, and therefore they prefer to simply lose or outright drop any customer in case of any and all problems. Conversely, small registrars may charge more, but have better (i.e. actually existing, and sometimes even dedicated and personal) support for when things go wrong, and have a vested interest in keeping you as a customer.
A small registrar might also be so small as to know you personally, which will help monumentally against any social engineering attacks.
Full disclosure: I work at such a registrar, but you’re probably not in our target market.
Especially because domain names are not expensive anyways, a dot com (gold standard of domains) has a cost to registrars of like 11 USD right now, so registrars can charge anywhere between 15 USD and 25 USD, maybe you can find one selling at cost at 11USD or at a loss with promotions even!
But we are talking about saving 10$/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.
I agree in principle, but businesses commonly own more than one domain name, so the costs add up.
Your water bill costs more than this. Your toilet rolls cost more than this. And certainly a cleaner costs more than this, if you have a business premise.
A small company might also fit all their employees and infrastructure in the same jurisdiction as yours. Which will make any legal trouble magnitudes simpler to handle compared to an big international company. (This is also simplified by also choosing your domain TLD:s to be similarly aligned.)
But as I have written elsewhere¹, my company’s home page isn’t even available in English. You are most likely not in our target market.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45118689
I moved out of there a while ago.
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.
In the last few years they managed to destroy that reputation though.
so costs need to go down (-human support + ai automation)
and prices go up (they increased i think .com 3 times this year alone)
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).
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.
but "numbers guys" say no, we need squeeze profits short term..
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-...
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
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.
I mean not always, but that does happen and that's what you hear about.
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.
I rejected porkbun in favour of hostinger just because porkbun is from the USA and hostinger is from Europe.
"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.
Same. Mine's less important than email, more for personal projects with a nice URL, but I still feel the pain of switching.
> I'm looking to move from Namecheap to Porkbun
You can already do this today with your .io and pay ~$52 instead of ~$76. It's what I did a few days ago when I saw the crazy renewal price.
It was way easier to transfer the domain than I expected. And if you host DNS somewhere else, without downtime.
$50 on Cloudflare where I have mine, so only halfway to $100, but still pretty expensive.
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.
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.
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.
1: https://ledger.worseonpurpose.com/brands/new-balance "Why Approved" section
>I never generate any writing end-to-end with AI.
Absolutely not true. Take the blurb I referenced:
----
Why Approved
Owns factories in a category where almost nobody does, and put $65M into expanding them in 2024. Asterisks stated plainly: US-made is a minority of output; the Made-in-USA claim runs on 70% domestic value against the FTC's all-or-virtually-all standard; and Cristostomo v. New Balance (D. Mass 1:21-cv-12095, Made-in-USA labeling class action) was dismissed with prejudice by joint stipulation on 2024-05-10 — no class certified, terms undisclosed.
----
Pangram gives it a 100%, and it's pretty obvious to a reader that this is AI (specifically Anthropic) generated. "stated plainly", etc.
This is more than just having it smooth out some writing.
Regardless, when people claim not to have generated something they demonstrably did, that damages their credibility and suggests the document is unreliable.
CrunchBase is usually accurate:
https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/namecheap#financials
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.
Ahhh crap, there goes the company down the toilet. And they were the place I trusted to buy my domain names from.
I'll have to move providers.
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.
Also found this list: https://www.forbes.com/advisor/business/software/best-domain...
Might be relevant for others looking for alternatives
porkbun is chinese food. not my favorite. to much dough...
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.
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...
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_surrounding_GoDa...
Admittedly any company will have it's share of controversies over time. But their history speaks to a value system that doesn't square with some of the foundational values of the internet (openness, decentralisation, user empowerment) imo.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
Oh boy, you don't know how many bad registrars won't let you customize the nameserver...
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 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.
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 done cheaping out on critical stuff now, especially the domain registrar.
HN is a community of rationalists, until something happens that makes them angry, then they become short term thinkers and sharpen the pitchforks.
Thank you.
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).
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.
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.
I'm happy it isn't state enterprise tho as that would probably be even worse.
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.
I’ve used them exclusively since 2011 and it’s been nothing but wonderful
DNS etc can be run by third parties
Besides, which government do you want to run .com domains
On the other hand, if you want to have a say in how other registries are run, then consider joining an at-large structure (ALS) local to you or the Non-Commercial Stakeholders Group: https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/civil-society
Personally I would not want the US government controlling and micro-managing who gets to have a .com domain.
Cloudflare has been pretty reliable so far. I've been using their services since the beginning.
Any experience? Are there any with updatable records through some API that does not just give access to the whole account?
Joker has no 3rd party scripts on their website, porkbun uses gstatic
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.
Have been happy with Porkbun so far.
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.
Weird argument. Given they're in the US, not complying with US sanctions on Iran isn't an option either.
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.
Sanctions are a hard cutoff. There isn’t room to allow serving sanctioned customers for a little while or giving them services to allow an off ramp. Sanctions mean “You must not serve these customers”. As soon as a company discovers they’ve been accidentally serving a sanctioned customer, they must stop immediately. If they were to continue giving them service or a grace period, they are violating the sanctions.
No, I don't think so.
I repeat. This was on Reddit. Consider what credibility there might be.
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...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30504812
(Before reacting to the headline, please read at least some of the discussion.)
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30507103
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namecheap#Termination_of_servi...
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.
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.
Now what?