> Back in the very early 2000's I owned a domain and a month after renewing it, the registrar refunded me the registration fee and took ownership of it - the new WHOIS entry was for the owner of that registrar.

Are you comfortable with sharing their reason (if they gave one) for doing that to you? That seems like a situation that would quickly cause a mass exodus of customers to a competitor.

Years ago when I first started helping people build a web presence, I used 1&1 Inc. as both a registrar and hosting provider. When one of my clients wanted to move to a cheaper host, I was happy to help her make the move, however 1&1 did everything short of taking ownership of the domain to stop her from doing so. They would delay the transfer, lock the domain after I'd unlocked it, and wouldn't respond to support requests. I finally had to threaten legal action to make them release the domain to the new registrar. I immediately pulled all of my own domains to a new registrar and moved my sites to a new host. They tried to delay my move as well, and again I had to say "lawyer" a few times before they let go.

If you're using a ccTLD, it's reasonable to expect country-specific policies.

What domain name and what registrar? Did you contest it with ICANN?

Only the registry really. The hosting provider usually doesn't control your domain, and the registrar is bound by the rules set by the registry.

It's still a significant counterparty risk though.

I run a registrar, and while we can mess with people's domains we would get in serious trouble with the registry and you would get the domain back if we did so. Many registries have rules which protect the domain owners from the whims of registrars, but if you are worried you can look it upf or your specific registry.

Whether the registrar has much power depends on the registry, usually not really (you usually can just move to a different registrar and the old registrar can not legally prevent you from doing so).

The hosting/email provider is obviously not a problem at all, as you can switch to a different provider at any time (just make sure to keep the domain registration and the service provider separate) if your current provider is an asshole--or you can just host your own server if you want to avoid any providers messing with your emails.

I strongly recommend people keep their domain registrar and hosting provider as separate entities. It makes it much less likely you'll suffer a catastrophic loss.

FastMail - 5$ per month

https://www.fastmail.com/pricing/

Both Gmail and Outlook are available for custom domain at about $50/year, which I guess is not prohibitive for most HNers.

I have gmail handling my email for a custom domain for free.

You sign up with Google and follow a process they have, which involves setting some MX records and CNAME records on your custom domain to point to google's hosts.

This was free within some limits... I guess I assume it still is? (I set this up years ago. Google's never asked me for money for it.) I don't remember what the limits are. I and my family never hit them. I guess there are limits on the number of accounts and storage space.

I suppose since it's free it's a matter of time before they stop doing this, but so far so good.

Pretty much any of the commercial email hosting providers: Rackspace, Google, Microsoft, FastMail, LuxSci and may more.

Setup your custom domain email to work with Zoho Mail for free. Then use a free Gmail inbox to add that email via Pop3. Then you can use a free custom domain email for sending/receiving with Gmail as your email client. Bam.

Yandex has free email for domains: https://domain.yandex.ru/

I've heard FastMail is good, but i've not used it myself.

Depends on the TLD. Many (most?) TLDs that's the max duration and thus isn't likely Namecheap being the restrictor there.