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Comment by scoot | Hacker News Reader

Worse, they'll happily sell you Whoisguard for domains that don't support it. When you discover it's not usable, they'll give you a refund, then include it again in the next billing cycle.

I switched to Namecheap based on recommendations here, and their previous stance on certain privacy issues, but I'm running out of alternatives.

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A happy NameCheap user for years, I have started switching away. Their horrid "modern" 40px padding everywhere bubbly redesign makes GoDaddy look good in comparison. A major pain to manage more than a couple of domains, and numerous user feedback seems to fall on deaf ears, e.g. [1][2][3][4]

Example weird feature: all domains are shown, even ones that you've let expire/sold years ago, and there is no way to hide them.

[1] https://community.namecheap.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=...

[2] https://community.namecheap.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=...

[3] https://community.namecheap.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=...

[4] https://community.namecheap.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=...

css stylebot or a smiliar extension that allows you to create persistent stylesheets could help you! i think your grievance is legitamate

That sounds like an awesome extension. I will have to look it up.

Do you mind sharing where you switched to?

Ah, just Amazon (which uses Gandi under the hood.)

Many pluses: predictable, can be administered using the AWS CLI, consolidated billing with other AWS services. Heck, can even register domains from the CLI.

Only downside as others have pointed out is that Gandi doesn't make it at all easy to hide your name or company contact information.

>Ah, just Amazon

So you are recommending someone switch over privacy concerns from namecheap to Amazon in story about how Amazon is leaking private Customer data.....

Really...

I've used joker.com for years. The website isn't pretty, but you can actually do many functions via pgp email.

Name.com has been legit for me for about 10 years. Use code PRIVACYPLEASE for free whois privacy (this code has worked for the past ~5 years). I've also used IWantMyName for some TLDs that name.com didn't have and I liked that they had 2FA, but overall it was much less polished.

What about Google domains?

I recommend Gandi. They support almost all the TLDs, their web UI is very decent, their support is excellent and they live up to their "No bullshit" motto. They are also overall good guys, donate to the EFF, took public stances against sopa and such...

They're a bit more expensive when it comes to domains but we're talking single dollars a year here.

I've been using Moniker for ages. I'm always surprised I don't see it recommended more often. They seem very steady and reliable.

Another Namecheap "gotcha" is they auto-renew any domains you have setup for auto-renewal a full month before you're due for expiration. So if you're thinking of moving away, and trying to decide as the expiration date approaches, make sure to disable auto-renew on those domains while you decide.

It was my understanding that the registration time you have with one registrar carries over with the next registrar. In other words, if your domain is automatically renewed for a year and you move to a different registrar and pay for one year, your domain will be registered for two years.

I must say that I have never verified this myself, mostly because I've never needed it that bad. At least something worth looking into if that problem arises.

Yep, that's exactly what happens: https://duckduckgo.com/?q="domain+transfer"+"remaining+time"

(Can actually confirm that from this month's experience, so it's even freshly verified :)

Not really a gotcha. Some TLDs require that early renewal and one month is how we handle to avoid any disconnection in service. But yes, if you move away after a domain is renewed (e.g. your domain expires in 2017, most registrars -- but not all -- will add a year to renew in 2018).

(Full disclosure: I work at Namecheap)

Same here - a satisfied Namecheap customer for years, but forced to move my domains away recently. Ironically, what originally brought me there was exactly the huge level of support for Namecheap in HN ranks (well, and few instances elsewhere.)

But their "redesign" and presumably the backend changes tied to it (or lack of them, whatever the real case is) resulted in the worst experience I've ever had with this kind of service in years, culminating in what was the last straw - one of my domains getting shut down five times in a single month due to bogus "domain contacts verification" procedures, which their support wasn't able to solve from early December to when I finally decided to move away in mid-January (from a short exchange after I moved away I assume it's still broken today as they were apparently "investigating it" even after I was gone. That after having it in some or some other way "fixed" for about three times during the previous support exchanges.) Honestly though during that time my tickets mostly kept bouncing back and forth through customer reps that insisted on politely suggesting things like "to check my spam folder", even though I specifically explained every time that I was in full control of my mail servers and that it is them who don't deliver any kind of verification emails to those servers, so there was really nothing that could even end up in "a spam folder" and that yes, I actually thoroughly checked that, several times over. Yet my requests for them to check their own mail logs because I'm here actually losing access to my domains without being able to do anything about it were each time politely swept under the rug with generic assurances like "they're working on it and will keep me informed"... Then quickly closed the ticket as fixed. Every time after the one particular domain went dark (and with another domain randomly flipping into bogus unverified states in the frontend interface, clearly lingering on the edge of the same fate), the domain was reactivated either by me or the customer support, was either set to have its contacts covered by WhoisGuard (which doesn't even use the contacts verification process at all), or at a later point even manually set back to fully verified by their techs (and one time completely having all my zone data wiped without explanation or apparently without whoever caused it having a backup at hand to restore it from) - only to again and again end up suspended as "unverified" several days later, losing me access to its emails, websites, everything...

Now I could still go on and on about how clunky the entire new interface compared to the old one is (yes, the original was lackluster, but not even remotely this level bad and in fact I've never had a single technical issue with it, other than being somewhat hard to navigate) and that ever since the redesign the new frontend frequently displays outdated or plain wrong information, crashes with cryptic errors, sometimes just decides to log you out five times in five minutes for no reason, but I think this is getting too long as it is anyway, so enough.

When I finally grew tired of running through their customer support in a neverending circle (to their credit, they were always very polite and nice, but it felt like that's all that Namecheap support was really trained for. And that clearly doesn't make my domains magically work there), I moved to Gandi just basing on their overall popularity and good reputation with a few people. Already in a week time I had two great support experiences with them and got my issues resolved each time in literally a single step of exchange. In the first case I've received about a page-length of actual technical reply from their support rep that not only bothered to carefully read through several issues that I ran into when trying to run a Python app on their web hosting platform that I ordered for the domains moved there, they even included a how-to custom tailored to my specific use case that was way beyond what I originally asked for and that ended up saving me quite some time discovering it on my own, and also acknowledged that they had a major issue in their documentation system and that they had it quickly fixed in meantime. Now second time was less technical, as I accidentally burned a discount code while customizing and re-customizing some orders in what was probably an unexpected way for their interface, that ended in the code never being applied to any order but still ended up as used and lost... I wrote down the problem in a few sentences, customer support quickly verified it and issued me a new replacement code right with the initial reply in what had to be less than an hour. Can't really say I'll be missing Namecheap any time soon.

Another ex-happy Namecheap customer here. Was going through credit card fraud issues back in July. In September out of nowhere get an email from Namecheap support that my July payment for one of the domains did not go through and I owe them $240 for the chargeback. No amount of reasoning got through to them - this is after several years of owning multiple domains with them. Dropped the penalty by $100, but that didn't exactly make it right. As I was considering my options, they locked all of my domains and redirected to parking pages. Had to pay up to get them back. Avoid at all costs.

TL;DR: Credit card was stolen, Namecheap penalized me for that and then blackmailed by locking all domains.

Wow, I was just about to switch to Namecheap. More people need to hear this. How can a registrar make DNS changes without permission and blackmail?

Please write a blog post about this.

"If you don't pay us, we'll turn it off" isn't blackmail.

But locking all of romanh's domains, so he can't take his business elsewhere, and transferring all of the traffic intended for his systems to somewhere else, does sound a lot like blackmail, not to mention blatant violation of how domain registration is supposed to work.

Also, $240 because of one chargeback, and doing the above while the customer is trying to sort out a fraud issue? Neither of those sounds like normal practice for a responsible domain registrar either.

Obviously there are two sides to every story and we're only seeing one here, but that one does look pretty bad for Namecheap.

Please see my comments above - there are ways around this but it appears that that path was never pursued.

Hey romanhn - did you contact support and try to make it right by reversing the chargeback?

This isn't about blackmail as jewsin writes in the comments, it's about the reputation a business suffers with a chargeback. All you would need to do is reverse the chargeback and the full charge would go away.

Disclosure: I work for Namecheap.

Hi tamar - thanks for reaching out! I was in contact with multiple members of the support team throughout this ordeal. Supposedly they consulted with senior management as well. Business reputation was never mentioned - it was always about paying a fee to the payment processor. At no point was chargeback reversal brought up. To be perfectly honest, I know nothing about chargebacks (this wasn't something I initiated, it was fraud-related) and the idea of a reversal never popped into my head. I may try to bring this up with them again, but I'm not sure how much I can do half a year after the fraud occurrence.

Still, I think my original points stand. I find Namecheap locking out unrelated domains and redirecting traffic unethical and in bad faith of the service provider / customer relationship. Not to mention that the domains continued to point to parking pages even after I paid up.

Hey romanhn - so sorry for this. Can you share your ticket number? I think there was a definite mistake in the process here as that should have been broached and if it requires some updated training for the billing team, I'll put in my recommendation for that.

I'm sorry as well for the parking page situation - my guess is it didn't immediately propagate, but I'd have to investigate further as to why that happened. Usually, it's not about redirecting traffic but just not letting you get into your account. This does not sound like it should have happened at all. I sincerely apologize that this is what you encountered.

p.s. I love how trying to genuinely be helpful has resulted in an onslaught of downvotes. I'm going to assume you helped balance that out with an upvote. So thanks :)

I did upvote, don't think the downvotes are deserved.

Sent my ticket number via the contact form on the website from your profile. I see that you spearheaded the SOPA membership surge - it's what got me to join in the first place.

Looks like things are working out right now - feel free to keep me posted. You know where to find me now ;)

p.s. I love how trying to genuinely be helpful has resulted in an onslaught of downvotes.

I wish people wouldn't do that. It does appear that Namecheap has behaved very poorly in this case, intentionally or otherwise. Sadly, downvoting a person who works for an organisation has become a proxy for downvoting the organisation itself on HN recently, which doesn't seem constructive, particularly if that person is trying to share relevant information and/or improve the situation.

But everyone's using a 10" Surface tablet now! We all need that 40px padding for our sausage fingers while tapping our screen at work.

lpsz - Tamar from Namecheap here. We're working on the padding. It's not that it's falling on deaf ears; it's just that it's taking time for us to implement and QA.

Also, the issue with all domains being shown is a bug. If you have a ticket number regarding this, please let me know and I'll investigate this further because it should be resolved.

I've always wondered why I never see pairNIC mentioned on the "everybody knows godaddy is garbage but who should I use to register domains?" threads on HN.

I have used them since they opened (2002) and never used anybody else after that, because I have never been dissatisfied. (I don't remember if the box is checked by default, but they definitely offer whois privacy, along with services like custom/dynamic DNS and some other stuff, at no extra charge).

Their site is kinda barebones and old-school, but there are real humans in the rare case you actually need one, and they've never done me wrong.

So for whatever that's worth: another recommendation on HN.

[1]: https://www.pairnic.com/about.html

Last I checked pairNIC was > $15/year for .com etc. That adds up when you have many domains. Therefore I use pairNIC for the domains I really care about, and Namecheap for the rest.

it seems they are down to $9.99/year: https://www.pairnic.com/prices.html

Wow! No excuses now. With pairNIC you can call up and talk to a technical person during business hours in Pittsburgh, PA.

I used Pair right after they were accredited as a registrar in the 90's up till the mid 2000's but found they were expensive both for domain registration and for hosting. Great customer service but for a commodity like a domain name it's just not worth it for me.

I'm happy with hover.com. They're part of Tucows, who I've been a fan of since the good ol' days.

OpenSRS is also Tucows but only for resellers. Their reseller system works alright. Used to use it when I worked for a hosting co.

Namesilo works well for me, and they have free whois privacy.

I've been a happy user of Google Domains since closed beta. I'll never go anywhere else for domains again.

Still waiting for them to open to the rest of the world, beta is only for USA. Frankly , no idea what is taking them so long.

What's wrong with name.com?

Depends on who you're asking and from what timeframe you're asking about. They used to be absolutely horrid in the age of alternate and meta-TLDs when the real rush to nab a domain was on. I can't speak about present times, however.

Plus Whoisguard is only free for the first year. There's Google Domains for $12/yr but the dollar and some savings isn't worth the hassle of switching away from Namecheap.

I'd recommend gandi.net; among many other reasons, they don't charge for whois privacy, though you still have to turn it on.

I have been happy with NameSilo.

They have a very strong privacy stance and take security seriously

Maybe check out gandi.net? Very happy with them so far.

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