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Comment by _nickwhite | Hacker News Reader

Us greybeards have been around long enough to experience several of these bad/evil domain registrars. One common path I see has been:

Network Solutions -> GoDaddy -> Namecheap -> Google Domains OR CloudFlare Domains

Seriously, if anyone is still using Netsol or Godaddy, there are much better alternatives, and it's very easy to make the transition- I've helped a good handful of friends.

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I use NameCheap. I would never use a company like Google where I can't at least call and talk to someone. Also, there are stories like this where someone gets their Google account locked for some random reason and all of the sudden your domain is now locked as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4825445

I've never used Google as a domain registrar. They're evil enough for other reasons that I wouldn't feel comfortable doing that.

Never use google domains either, had a client who's entire domain got hijacked/redirected to googles phishing warning page for a few days because of some automated anti-phishing bot false positive.

That's unrelated to google domains, though. Your client's domain ended up on a list distributed by Google Safe Browsing.

No this isn't the normal, you've clicked on a link to example.com on a google.com search page/gmail/whatever and google instead redirects to the safe browsing page.

I'm talking about google domains itself, at the DNS level, will hijack your ENTIRE example.com domain and redirect to a safe browsing page.

That's interesting, I did not know Google could do that.

I suppose in the end any domain provider could do the same.

That's exactly my transition (although I also used DirectNic for a while after Netsol in the 2000s). I'm happy with NameCheap but CloudFlare has a better interface, more features, and it's a bit cheaper.

Thoughts on Hover vs Namecheap? I've been using Hover for a while now and they haven't given me any issues but I wonder if there's something better out there that I just haven't looked into.

I have historic feels for Hover (they're Tucows, aka OpenSRS a very early domain registrar with reselling as the primary), but having recently moved some domains elsewhere, I find it kind of distressing that Hover didn't remove the domains I moved from the account page and they still send reminders about renewal even though it's not expiring.

At some point of time GoDaddy present me an offer to renew domain for 4 figure price and offered a fantastic discount , so that final price is $10. I paid those 10 bucks to Cloudflare to transfer domain.

I use Gandi these days.

I also used Gandi until they had a data loss incident and basically told users to get bent.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22001822

Now I use cloudflare. No BS, no up-charging, fast, easy, and automatable.

Thanks for the heads up. I hadn't heard this.

Porkbun for me.

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