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Comment by Scaless | Hacker News Reader

6 years later, nothing's changed.

https://techcrunch.com/2014/01/29/godaddy-admits-hackers-soc...

Stay far, far away from godaddy.

I think there are good reasons to avoid GoDaddy, but do HN-ers feel like there are registrars whose employees would never fall for social engineering techniques, or whose systems and/or processes make such a scenario far less likely?

Companies with better established security infrastructure like AWS and Google make for better registrars in my opinion. They're not perfect, for example with Google you might lose your domains due to a youtube infraction. Actually, now that I think about it strike Google from the list, just AWS really.

I would love to use AWS's registrar exclusively for anything I host there, but unfortunately they have a pretty limited selection of TLDs. it's more important to me that all my domains are in one place so I can review them at once. I really wish they would support more.

If "viewing all at once" in a single UI is more important then security, reliability, etc., you don't have many constraints to begin with.

a domain registrar has three functions:

1. configure my nameservers and whois info.

2. pay my bills.

3. prevent other people from taking over my domain.

I can see how AWS would give you more confidence in #3.

considering AWS is just reselling Gandi, I would love to hear how AWS (or any registrar) can be more reliable than another :)

If it's really important, you need a registrar and a registry with a Registry Lock program. With this in place, when you want to make a change, you notify the registrar, who notifies the registry, who carries out the authentication procedure and, if successful, allows the domain to be changed, then relocks.

Note that the registry may only be available to do unlock procedures for limited hours, usually business hours in their locale; that might be inconvenient if it's not your locale.

My understanding is Cloudflare can do registry locks, but does not offer registrar services standalone. Corporate oriented registrars like CSC and MarkMonitor offer it. I don't have experience eith CSC, but MarkMonitor had a pretty high minimum spend (I think 10k/year) to get on their platform circa 2013; that may have changed, also they're now owner by a VC firm, just FYI.

NetworkSolutions (boo hiss), rolled out a registry lock feature after a high profile hijacking which was why my employer had me work with MarkMonitor.

AWS because they don't have customer service.

Not so fast. Six or so years ago someone reset the password on my account from the retail site's live chat because they knew info found in a whois.

Thankfully I only used that account for some retail purchases.

What? Yes they do. There’s even premium support options for a few k a month you can have dedicated and responsive support

And if you can’t afford a few k a month for a dedicated support person for your infra, then you aren’t worth supporting - I.e. go to godaddy

The market kind of helps optimise this.

it should be noted that GoDaddy also own quite a few other registrars e.g. Host Europe Group who own 123-reg, Heart Internet, Host Europe, Webfusion, RedCoruna, Mesh Digital and Domainbox

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Host_Europe_Group

What registrar would you recommend instead?

namecheap has actually been a really good registrar, contrary to what the name suggests.

Instead of compromizing cryptocurrency services, they support paying for their services in cryptocurrency. That's arguably a better strategy for engaging with the target audience of crypto enthusiasts ;)

I'm not very confident about Namecheap, given how long it took them to add 2FA. It seems to me that if they cared about security they wouldn't have waited literally years to do it.

Cloudlfare does domains at cost, and I use them for every TLD they support.

I've had great experience with porkbun, and no major complaints with namecheap.

Nearlyfreespeech is more of a host than a registrar, but I feel they generally have really good practices and procedures areound security. I certainly trust them more than Godaddy. That said, they don't support a lot of .wacky suffixes other registrars might.

Namecheap and Porkbun are pretty good.

Namecheap is bigger, so it's possible to get support people that aren't amazing. Porkbun is pretty small and I feel like there's less room for underperforming support staff when you have less than 10 of them.

Porkbun has an extra "domain password protection" option where you can require and extra password retrieving an auth code for domain transfer. I'm not sure how much use that is though. Once someone is into the account to the point they can change NS, the real world impact is similar to having the domain transferred away (and recovered).

Cloudflare.

gandi.net has always been outstanding.

Second for gandi - I had very good experience with them, although prices are a bit higher than namecheap or porkbun.

EasyDNS.

It's been around since 1998 and is a founder-owned company, and the founder wrote the book on managing mission-critical domains:

https://www.amazon.com/Managing-Mission-Critical-Demystifyin...

And they do offer registry lock (on a limited number of TLD's.)

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