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Comment by ted0 | Hacker News Reader

Only upvoting this for visibility.

This decision hurts the consumer/registrant in the end, making future registrations and renewal costs less accessible to a lot of markets.

For clarity, this $8.39 amount will become the wholesale cost to the registrar — we of course need to markup on top of that to cover our processing costs, overhead to offer great support, mitigate abuse, etc. Registrars do the heavy lifting in delivering the core user experience — we see none of this margin and the consumer does not see any incremental value from this hike by the registry.

Namecheap stands against removing price caps and allowing these incremental price hikes that only hurt the consumer.

-Ted from Namecheap

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Ted, I've used namecheap for years and I love it. One thing though, when I visit namecheap while using a VPN it makes me fill out a cloudflare captcha. Any way to stop that? Considering I have already paid you money, you have my address, name, phone number, etc. it seems a bit ridiculous to ask for a captcha when visiting using a VPN.

Captcha is likely being triggered by Cloudflare. We have heard this feedback in this past and have listened but it's always a tricky balance of fighting abuse/bots and presenting an extra step for the user.

Since we are at the topic of Cloudflare captchas, Namecheaps blog rss feed is "protected" by a captcha as well, defeating the purpose of a rss feed.

I have no clue about our blog RSS feeds to be honest but I can ask the team.

Also, as a general aside to web devs, if we need captchas, can we at least use something less obnoxious and more privacy friendly, like:

https://friendlycaptcha.com/

I put this on my signup form and have had zero spam since, and it has very little impact on user experience. The fact that it doesn't feed the google surveillance machine is a bonus.

Cloudflare no longer uses Google's ReCaptcha, it's now using HCaptcha (https://blog.cloudflare.com/moving-from-recaptcha-to-hcaptch...)

HCaptcha is not without problems, it is monetized by selling ML model training to 3rd parties, where the images and the labelling requests come from. Personally, I do not wish to be employed to train ML models of 3rd parties unknown to me. I have no idea about what model I'm helping train and what it is going to be used for. Transparency in this regard would go a long way towards making HCaptcha friendlier (I'm not going to talk about the ethics of free labor this time, though those too ought to be discussed.)

bots?

what are they doing on namecheap? buying domain names?

(if they're hitting your domain checker you can configure cloudflare to only captcha protect that page...)

I have the same problem with VPN. I get captcha on so many websites over and over it's ridiculous. Sometimes on different pages of the same domain! It used to be you only got captcha for form submissions. But somewhere along the line you started getting it for simply visiting web pages as well. Part of me wonders if I'm just getting played by these companies into labelling all their training sets for them.

Surprisingly, Cloudflare doesn't force me to complete a CAPTCHA while logging in to manage my domains with them with a third-party VPN enabled. On the other hand, Namecheap doesn't even allow me to log in using that VPN.

I migrated all of my domains away from Namecheap after their support told me that my (non-Namecheap) VPN needed to be disabled before I could log in. Namecheap now sells their own VPN service, so there is some conflict of interest in the VPN restriction.

Cloudflare does not require me to turn off my third-party VPN before logging in, and sells domains at cost (at lower rates than Namecheap). For example, Cloudflare charges $8.03/year for a .com domain ($7.85 Verisign rate + $0.18 ICANN fee), which will go up to $8.39 + whatever the new ICANN fee is after the Verisign/ICANN price hike. Namecheap currently charges $8.88 for the registration year and $12.98 every year after that, with the rates also going up after the price hike. Porkbun also charges less for renewals than Namecheap, and covers TLDs that Cloudflare doesn't.

Cloudflare pricing for .com: https://www.cloudflare.com/products/registrar/

Namecheap pricing for .com: https://www.namecheap.com/domains/

Correction: Namecheap also adds the $0.18 ICANN fee to the domains, so their .com rates are $9.06 for the first year and $13.16 every year after.

It sounds like our support was trying to help you troubleshoot a login issue — to say that we “require you to disable VPN” to login so that we can push our own VPN product on you is absolutely false and actually kind of absurd if you know anything about our business.

No, please don't twist my words. Namecheap's support rep told me that Namecheap is rejecting logins from customers using the third-party VPN, and that Namecheap has no plans to allow customers using the third-party VPN to log in. It is relevant to point out that Namecheap is refusing service to customers who use one of Namecheap's competitors. That's a conflict of interest, whether you admit to it or not.

Since you’re closer to this and this has been asked in other comments,

Is there a reason for doing this besides ‘we can’? Not sure if there’s something we aren’t seeing or aren’t privy to.

To add to that, why can they actually? Why doesn't the EU just start a new .com registry that the rest of the world can actually refer to? I don't have a complete understanding of the TLD world but I can imagine it's much like the AS world with BGP. If the rest of world decides that one registry (Verizon's .com registry) isn't the leading authority, but rather the EU's .com registry for example, is. Than what "can" verizon actually do against it? Sure, the internet would break with namesquatting but atleast it's better than paying a ransom.

Here’s a starting point for you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_DNS_root

Thank you!

In the end, it's under ICANN's purview and in this case, also allowed by a decision made by the Trump administration in 2018. Verisign has a Cooperative Agreement with the US Government. The gist:

"The amendment repeals Obama-era price controls and provides Verisign the pricing flexibility to change its .com Registry Agreement with ICANN to increase wholesale .com prices. Specifically, the flexibility permits Verisign to pursue with ICANN an up to 7 percent increase in the prices for .com domain names, in each of the last four years of the six-year term of the .com Registry Agreement. The changes also affirm that Verisign may not vertically integrate or operate as a registrar in the .com top level domain."

Thank you Ted.

I wanted to also mention that I appreciate what you and everyone at Namecheap do and the transparency when fighting things.

Thank you. That means a lot!

> we of course need to markup on top of that to cover our processing costs, overhead to offer great support, mitigate abuse, etc

Why "of course"? Cloudflare is able to provide domains transfers and renewals at wholesale rates.

Loss leader.

The markup from legacy registrars is probably excessive, but with Google, Cloudflare, etc getting into the game, they can likely offer wholesale pricing to support the rest of their (very) profitable product lines.

Exactly. Depends how you define legacy registrars but I can agree with you to an extent. Namecheap's retail pricing is not excessive by any means — domains on their own are essentially commoditized — it all depends how much you value service and trust. Try calling Google if your domain is hijacked, your account is locked, or you have any number of other issues with a high value domain.

Yes. Just got off the phone with your support this morning. It made the process so much faster and easier. Instead of spending 3 hours trying to fix it myself and reading countless search results, I got it fixed in 5 minutes. Never, ever would happen with Google or Yahoo.

> Namecheap's retail pricing is not excessive by any means

$12.98 for a .com domain renewal is a 65% upcharge over the $7.85 wholesale rate. That is considerably more expensive than many of Namecheap's competitors.

Others will do it cheaper and make it up with cloud, email, etc services. That’s why we’ve moved away from Namecheap (who were my go-to for many years).

If I’m really worried about domain hijacking, locking, etc I’d use something like MarkMonitor.

Domain name registration is not their core business and their feature set is limited, as is their direct support for a lot of TLDs. It works well for a lot of people, which is fine but it is likely a loss-leader for them and treated as a user-acquisition channel.

Does Cloudflare do registrations at all?

Only renewals.

Renewals and transfers.

... and, for now, you have to transfer your nameservers to CloudFlare.

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