Are there any alternatives that people are fond of? I’ve been on Google domains so long I’m not sure what the playing field looks like these days.
They are a french company. Their slogan is "No Bullshit," (2) and I think they've done a decent job of living up to that.
My only frustration has been a situation where I was transferring an existing domain over to them. I wanted to create the zone file ahead of time so that when the transfer happened, there would be an identical zone file ready to go. But they wouldn't allow me to create a zone file for a domain that hadn't transferred over to them yet. Since I'm not doing anything critical with my domains, it was just an annoyance, but that would be a show-stopper for some.
As it pertains to billing problems, they allow you to pre-pay a chunk of money to your account. (They take PayPal.) It deducts from that amount when domains renew. That provides a buffer if you need to cancel your credit card.
Also, on the occasions that I have created trouble tickets, they have been responded to in a reasonable amount of time with helpful information.
(1) https://www.gandi.net (2) https://www.gandi.net/en/no-bullshit
On that note, their secondary nameserver suited my needs until I started using DNS authentication for Let’s Encrypt wild-card certificates. Their secondary nameserver only supports requesting a full zone transfer (AXFR) every half hour or so. For some reason, they don’t use IXFR or – what would be more useful to me – DNS NOTIFY. This means that the secondary name server lags behind the primary nameserver by about half an hour. This results in the Let’s Encrypt DNS authentication failing randomly, depending on whether they checked the primary or secondary nameserver for the authenticating TXT records. I plan to move the `_acme-challenge.example.com` to a different zone that doesn’t use the secondary nameserver but I haven’t got around to it yet.
Otherwise, I’ve been very happy with Gandi.
¹ https://docs.gandi.net/en/domain_names/advanced_users/second...
What is the reason, surely there must be some service/quality difference or… something?
If you mean namecheap doesn't support letsencrypt DNS-01 challenge, you can still buy your domain in namecheap but point your NS somewhere else that support DNS-01 challenge (e.g. cloudflare, Route53, or even Google Cloud DNS).
Most letsencrypt clients uses HTTP-01 challenge though, which doesn't care about who's hosting your dns.
I tried to reason with Richard [CEO who says to be 'open' to user input], but I didn't even get a robotic response.
The truth is that the web environment is totally corrupted and the domain registration process seems like something under the control of the mafia. A refoundation of the network is in order.
Disclosure: The domain is registered on the excellent and unbiased Registro.br [unfortunately below the top level .com]. Namecheap allowed me to create aucky.live and aucky.app. I want my aucky.com. (*)The service proper is in the making.
I’d be interested in hearing about other smaller services that work well.
There exist some companies who specialize in protecting domain names. Not just from fradulent transfer attempts, but also from bad corporate actors (like Google, Cloudflare?, etc). The two ones I know of are Mark Monitor and AppDetex, though I'm sure there's others. [AppDetex is a former client of mine].
As a related comment said - if the registrar you're using isn't afraid of a bad reputation (Google, etc) then you probably should think of using one that is.
I would highly recommended porkbun over CF for registrar services.