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Comment by TekMol | Hacker News Reader

So as a domain owner you are completely at the mercy of your registrar?

What is considered a reliable registrar in Europe?

> What is considered a reliable registrar in Europe?

I heard a lot of good things about German INWX[1], even though French Gandi[2] is more popular and is the registrar of ycombinator.com (and was the registrar of reddit.com until recently, before they moved to MarkMonitor).

[1] https://www.inwx.de/en

[2] https://www.gandi.net/en

I can highly recommend INWX. What I like about them is that the service they provide is domains only (I don't consider their web hosting offers [1] seriously). Thus no conflict of interest and resources are focused on a good domain service.

[1] https://www.inwx.de/en/hosting

For private or business use?

Privately I’m pretty happy with Namecheap, they never failed to provide the support I needed in a friendly and precise manner. For business purposes with high value domains MarkMonitor seems to be the industry leader.

Both seem to be US companies. What levarage do you have over them if they screw you? I would say none. Suing a company overseas is pretty much impossible.

Ah I see, beg your pardon, I misunderstood your question. If you’re looking for domain registrars located in Europe I can only suggest one as I don’t have much experience dealing with others. Epag [1] has always been nice to deal with.

[1] - https://www.epag.de/en/

I love namecheap - customer for over 10 years - but a recent incident has me rethinking my patronage. We recently received a "lawyer DDOS" - where a law firm sent multiple letters claiming /alleged/ trademark infringement. Without proof of identity, proof of subpoena, judge's order - whatever - namecheap rolled over on their WHOIS protection. There was no dialog, no email from legal, nothing.

I was dismayed to see that someone can literally send one email, get your personal info, and impact your company.