I've never had this happen before with Namecheap. What gives? I'm trying to assume the best. What is an explanation here that is not malicious intent?
I'm sure they could do this more informatively though, but they're not alone in not doing that..
I'd be very surprised if a big name like Namecheap were doing that today though. Probably just a coincidence that someone else bought it while you were deciding.
The risks with getting caught doing that intentionally are very high, but preventing any employee with access to lookup information, email addresses, etc, from selling it has been a very hard problem that most large names have admitted to failing at a few times.
Guessing you tried to register a dictionary word on one of the new tlds?
Been got by it too "Ah. That would be why this gem of a domain was still available"
BTW, I am a Namecheap customer for 20 years now :D
I disagree. If a company portrays itself explicitly or implicitly as offering low prices them it's more than fair when they jack up prices.
Namecheap's own description is "Buy cheap domain names and enjoy 24/7 support."
I do not understand why people feel the need to play the role of a corporate white knight and do their best to shield them from any criticism.
FWIW, "quit whiteknighting for the megacorps", when someone rejects a comment that happens to slight a corporation, is just as tired as their complaint no matter how effective "down with teh corporations!1" is on social media.
That makes as much sense as accusing someone of whiteknighting just because they happen to defend a female politician or whoever.
Namecheap advertises cheap domains when, as covered in this discussion, it jacks up prices. This is impossible to defend even by the staunchest corporate shill.
Anyone can opt to go off tangents playing semantics games. Meanwhile, if a company portrays itself as selling cheap products and services and then charges a hefty premium in exchange for nothing, they deserve being called out on what amounts to false advertising.
> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
GP suggested the complaint about nameCHEAP wasn't well received because it's boring, not because it's wrong or unfair. It's not a semantic game I'm playing, I agree that the reason the complaint wouldn't be well received is because it is boring/not interesting.
Downvotes may not mean "this company doesn't deserve to be called out." They may mean "I didn't come here to wade through boring content."
It's about as interesting as the armchair philosophy 101 HN comment that humans are also nothing more than statistical token prediction machines.
It would be such a bummer if my brain wasn't just finding patterns that didn't really exist in the noise of consumerism and NameCheap started taking on dark patterns like this. Vetting and switching registrars is a headache.
After a run around with support, I switched to another provider. What's silly is the domains were for my own use only (some VPS servers). I frankly would never recommend Namecheap. Despite their popularity, they're terrible in my experience.
Also had the same experience, I even complained to their customer support about it. The cheap price is already in my cart then when i try to pay it, it doesnt proceed.
Keep in mind this happened to me already over the course of many years, just as what other users have experienced.
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2326790 and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_name_front_running
No sense tripping up all the gTLD and registars’ mousetraps of shady jacked-up pricing scheme.