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Comment by NikkiA | Hacker News Reader

I have mixed feelings about this, the increase by ICANN is outrageous, but at the same time NameCheap are positioning themselves as heros here, and I've been burnt multiple times by the byzantine way their renewal system tries to fool you into paying for the wrong thing (put 'registration period as 10 years? suuure, we won't tell you you're paying for 10 years of privacy guard over 1 year of domain registration though')

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The WhoisGuard service is free with registration now.

Separate the issues and it'll make your conscience clearer. I too have issues w/ how NameCheap presents things (sale prices for other TLDs don't clearly state renewal rates for example), but that is orthogonal to their position here.

Actually they do clearly state renewal prices and I can't remember a time in which they didn't:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/5fpqtji40aprg1w/IMG_4790.jpg?dl=0

Note that I'm not even a native English speaker, so you'd think that such misunderstandings would happen more to people like me.

That says retail not renewal. Often during sales of products companies will put full price so you know your savings, not often is it really the full price you'll pay later. One might think "sale for x/yr" would be different than "sale for x/1yr".

> NameCheap are positioning themselves as heros here

They have a history of jumping on various issues for marketing purposes. They got a lot of there core users by going against the founder of GD and spamming reddit with anti GD comments.

If you want a good registrar with free whois privacy (that is easier to manage than NameCheaps) and better prices, go with NameSilo

I don't think it's simply marketing purposes. They actually try to make a different and impact. On .ORG they filed an official complaint with ICANN because they could as a registrar. Their CEO has been in the domain industry I think over two decades now and actually cares about it. What's good for consumers buying domains is good for NameCheap I'm sure.

After that DNSSEC outage the other day with no notification or anything from them before or afterwards, I've been slowly moving my domains away from them.

If they really wanted to fight back they could do a lot more than just post on their blog. Why don't they fund ICANN like Verisign is and maybe ICANN will start to listen?