Namecheap is buying and holding onto domains you're interested in?

It shouldn’t be hard for someone making these claims to show whois data before and after. Maybe the whois before requires some foresight, but the whois after does not. I will note that despite putting “Confirmed” in the title of their Reddit post and saying they did a whois search that showed Namecheap had bought the domain, the user has not provided that whois data, nor the domain name so that others can independently confirm.

The price of a domain registration going up in real time as you’re trying to buy it is obviously a frustrating experience. Domain name frontrunning is a legitimate concern, shady registrars have done it in the past (e.g. NetworkSolutions), and there are many other entities besides registrars that might do it as well.

Trying to register a domain name is notably not a hygienic process at the best of times, the information that someone might be willing to pay money for a particular domain name could leak and be exploited at many different stages of a typical search process. Unfortunately, the user only finds out they’ve been exploited when they try to pay on the registrar’s site. Registrars concerned about being unfairly accused might find that providing some transparency into the process can assuage this reaction - perhaps a “why did this price go up?” button/link that shows excerpts from your log history of whois calls for that domain name, or if the problem is the gTLD provider changing their prices on the fly, maybe a log of that information over time.

(Exhaustive potential conflict of interest disclaimer: I hold ~$40/year worth of registrations through Namecheap and another ~$30/year worth of registrations through Gandi. Besides these two aforementioned purchases, I do not and have never been employed by, held an investment position in, or maintained any other kind of financial relationship with any domain registrar [lookup service, TLD provider, etc.] in any form.)

I had a similar experience with my domain, hegz.me, which I had purchased from Namecheap. I allowed it to expire and did not pay the redemption fees, thinking I could buy it again at a later time. However, to my surprise, after the redemption period had ended, it was listed for a price of $2,888. Can you explain why this is the case?

Thank you, our policy has absolutely not changed and never will. We are in the business of serving our customers, not attempting to take advantage of them in any way.

I have to imagine they coded in some stop-gap like 3 domains per unique visitor or something, otherwise even legitimate window shoppers could ruin them.

That said, if anyone has a bot net they're not using...

This is a random Reddit post why is everyone treating it as 'news' or even correct?

Switched myself and every project I’m involved with to Cloudflare registrar a while ago because of their front-running.

Namecheap completely burnt all the goodwill and positive word-of-mouth they had built up.

It would be nice to have an independent and reputable registrar outside of the big co’s but it’s apparent that the shadiness and incentives in the industry don’t allow this to happen.

> never search anywhere except Google or Amazon domain

Will these two are probably safe, if you want to be certain I suggest checking with the registry operator itself. You can often find these on https://nic.tld. For example: nic.io, nic.nl, nic.cloud, nic.foo, etc. For com/net/org check ICANN directly: https://lookup.icann.org/

I'm sorry that your domain was registered by someone else but it had nothing to do with our company, I can assure you of that.

> I’ve searched for domain names and came up with some great ones only to find that very soon after they were registered by nanecheap.

That could easily be a coincidence. For one thing you don't know about all the domains that were searched for that were not registered by the registrar. Only the ones you searched for (which could very easily be registered for another reason meaning there was another signal indicating their desirability and you even said 'and came up with some great ones only to find').

> Do a Google search on Namecheap frontrunning and you’ll find tons of posts of people talking about how it happened to them.

Is this really the way you think? You do a search and if people are reporting a certain 'symptom' well it must be correct. An anecdote. I drank coffee this morning and XYZ happened wow 'many' people had the same experience!

> If you don’t want to lose that great domain name, never search anywhere except Google or Amazon domains.

As others have pointed out you can also just search from the command line using whois. Not sure why you think that Google or Amazon are super safe either. Amazon runs many domains through gandi.net. Either of them have their own downside. At least at Namecheap you can actually last I checked get in touch with the CEO or an actual employee.

You seemed willing to participate when you posted originally. I'm curious what changed?

I think the most likely explanation, if anyone is doing this, is an employee watching a log file and doing it on their own for domains that sound particularly desirable to them.

So you didn't renew your domains and chose not to have them auto-renew?

You have something like 60 days after they expire to reverse it. It’s been a long time, but you should have been able to get them back.

This is the way.

Yup. Hate to give yet more business to the behemoths, but I know Amazon will not play these games.

Still bitter about a domain that Godaddy stole from me when I wanted to quickly query one. Even at the time, I knew better, but was in a rush.

Do you want to suggest an alternative?

Let me assure you, you are right. We would never do this as firstly, it is unethical and secondly we value our customers. Thanks for being one of them.

What are you going to point them to? A random Reddit post that provides zero details?

Thanks, these claims are absolutely false. We do not monitor nor register domain names that been searched at Namecheap, period.

I'm very satisfied with porkbun. Haven't noticed any behaviour like that and really like their straight forward approach.

I've used Joker.com for years and never had this issue, or really any issue with them. I'm in the US, but at the time they were the cheapest for .com and they've been great.

I have never had an issue with EasyDNS. I also do not have tremendous requirements.

Porkbun is very transparent and up front about every DNS transfer operation. Performant, free NS records (cough, looking at you Cloudflare), and priced well

This is definitely unscrupulous. It would be illegal if domains were a regulated market.

This seems basically like the definition of frontrunning:

> purchasing a security based on advance non-public information regarding an expected large transaction that will affect the price of a security

Domain searches are not public info. Domain expiry maybe, depending on how the expiry is handled (open auction where registrar bids vs registrar getting a unfair advantage and buying the domain before it becomes accessible to anyone else).