Domain Registrars Which Developers Recommend | Hacker News Reader

Domain Registrars Which Developers Recommend

blog.pragmaticengineer.com

45 pointsrandomint6452 comments

> [Namecheap] has an outdated, 2000s-era UI, but to me, that's a positive sign.

I wish more websites had outdated, 2000s-era UI.

"Trendy" and "modern" are not synonymous with "good". "Outdated" is not synonymous with "bad". Change for the sake of change is not good. Following trends just means you don't know how to think for yourself.

I'm sure Cloudflare provides a great service, but putting both DNS services and domain registration under one umbrella feels like too large a single point of failure to me. Switching registrars is super annoying (I'm so glad I didn't trust Google Domains long-term for anything important)

That's my gut instinct, too. An alternate interpretation: putting them under 2 umbrellas now has 2 SPOFs.

I've found switching registrars to be pretty easy. I've done it several times with production domains.

A domain registrar can change the record of DNS servers that your domain is pointing at anyways. So I don’t see your concern.

How is switching registrars annoying?

I've been using Gandi for the last decade but I'm looking at rolling over to porkbun. I was initially attracted to them being in a privacy-friendly country as well as competitively priced and included free email accounts that suited my limited needs. They got bought out a few years back and things have been badly degrading in terms of offerings vs price. They're now completely ditching any free email later this year and the renewals have skyrocketed in price. They've also started sending off awful and obvious customer retention emails about how much they value me as a customer (despite, you know, showing nothing but contempt for my wallet).

I switched to Gandi over a decade ago because they were in a non-US jurisdiction, had proper 2FA and reasonable policies. The recent buyout is why I started moving over to Porkbun (I also have a Cloudflare account, but don't want to host my DNS with them).

Same here - I just moved my project domains from Gandi to NearlyFreeSpeech after a decade or so. All of the reasons I chose Gandi originally have disappeared and they keep raising prices while cutting features. Sad times, I really liked them.

Well said, I've also been using Gandi for quite some time now. I recently moved a .com domain over to Cloudflare. However, I'm still using them for some ccTLDs that Cloudflare doesn't yet support.

I suspect the changes at Gandi under the new owners will see it sliding off that list.

Yup, i transferred all mine to Porkbun. I'm happy with them so far, but domain registrars are funny like that - they're fine until they aren't.

Nevertheless, i love that Porkbun is local.

For such a simple service, its weird right?

Is it because they don't capture enough volume on registrations alone? I wonder what makes them usually trend to mediocre (at best) to awful (at worst, unfortunately often)

I tried to move to namesilo but oh my what a terrible interface. I’m on the fence as to what to do now.

AWS, Dynadot or Porkbun are all great options.

Ooh I mean cloudflare I'm sure is good but do we really want to give them control over all our boutique domains _as well_?

It is amazing, for the base concept of the Internet being a decentralized network to survive outages, how much centralization has occurred. I use a separate registrar (porkbun in my case), with that thought in mind.

Thats the main reason I don't register through CloudFlare too. I've heard lots of comments like the parent "its good enough". But I don't want to centralize my domain and my CDN. A little separation is nice. So I register elsewhere and use CloudFlare proxies.

CloudFlare still feels "too good to be true" to me. I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop. They offer way too much for free. I'm taking advantage of the free tier CDN for now, since it is overly generous. But I keep thinking one day they are going to pull the rug out from under us (like we've seen with so many tech companies before) and a lot of devs will feel trapped with CloudFlare. So that is why I mostly keep my domain registrations away from them. The savings are honestly minimal in my experience for registrations.

It's like having a prenup. If they sour the relationship and I want a divorce, it's easy to just point my domains elsewhere and move on quickly and effortlessly.

Cloudflare is post IPO, no more VC pressure in that way, and their founders have pretty strong control of the board.

I suppose the true test will be when wall street investors try to squeeze cloudflare, but I believe the founders have majority control of the company anyway, re: Meta & Zuckerburg, they could rightly tell them to F off.

Why am I mentioning this? Because I think if Cloudflare wanted to squeeze customers, they could have done so already.

Also, Cloudflare Enterprise pricing more than makes up for their free tiers, it does jump in cost significantly from their highest paid plan -> enterprise.

Also, their compute is priced on the mid-high end (not highest, certainly, its more high for medium or low high, if you will). KV storage and durable objects aren't the cheapest in their class either. Their margins on these services alone I imagine are lucrative.

I don't think Cloudflare is overvalued or particularly overpriced, but they aren't basement cheap either.

re: CDN. At cloudflares maturity and scale, their CDN is incredibly cheap to run and their generous free tier reflects this. Sending cached files around the world isn't as expensive as it used to be.

In the early days of DigitalOcean we pushed people to iwantmyname for no other reason than the platform was super easy to use, no pushing additional services, and Timo the founder is a really stand up guy. I still think Timo is a super awesome dude but the platform has stagnated a bit. I really like what namecheap is doing and also that Ted is active here on HN news. I've had multiple issues (my fault) and one email to Ted and they've been fixed. If it's support you're after, I for sure think iwantmyname and namecheap are the two top registrars.

I like Cloudflare well enough, but prefer not to be forced to use its DNS (even though I do use it), so am very happy with Porkbun post-Google-Domains.

I have used hover for over a decade. Clean and straight forward interface. Free private whois. Never had a single issue so I highly recommend.

Same here. Hover has never given me a single problem.

Their parent company also owns a postpaid cell service provider called Ting that they operate with the same care and efficiency.

Great people altogether

Hover's parent company is Tucows, listed in the parent article as being the third largest "domain holder".

I started using Hover/Tucows back when they were Domain Direct, as I liked the idea of using a Canadian-based registrar. Hover has been great. I've rarely needed to contact Hover support but they've always been responsive and helpful.

Is there any registrars that don't have free private whois?

Yes. 123 Reg is just one example that comes to mind.

Been using Cloudflare registrar professionally and for personal use for the last few years. Came from google domains, which was a terrible experience even before all of this. Can't say enough positive things, if my opinion means anything to anyone at all - just wanted to second this recommendation.

Thus far I've been using Namecheap and wasn't aware that Cloudflare even operated publically as a registrar.

Even now, after googling, I found https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/dns/what-is-cloudflare-r... but am still unclear, e.g., what I'd pay for it. Moving to cloudflare does seem to require using their DNS server for the domain in question according to https://developers.cloudflare.com/registrar/get-started/tran... but would be nice to be able to get a quick answer to a question like "what do you charge for a 1 year .com or .net registration?" without having to sign up for an account.

For Google Domains customers being dumped onto Squarespace (like me):

https://domains.squarespace.com/google-domains

"Squarespace will honor all existing Google Domains customers’ renewal prices for at least 12 months after closing the acquisition, ensuring that domain hosting and management remains hassle-free."

It seems like there's no hurry to consider migrating yet.

If I do migrate:

  - might consider Namecheap
  - GoDaddy's renewal pricing I can't figure out
  - Porkbun sounds too hipster for my tastes though I do like pork
  - Cloudflare sounds altruistic but they want to get up all inside my domain's stuff with their proxying; I'm not sure if that could cause any issues with my Letsencrypt or other TXT records.

By default, Cloudflare tries to proxy your domains and subdomains, but there is a little switch next to each record that you can turn from orange to gray which will make it "DNS Only". So then, it is only a DNS record.

It's a little annoying but you definitely ARE NOT REQUIRED to use their proxies, but you are ENCOURAGED to.

Their dns management interface is pretty solid though and their API is top notch. Plus they have good support for DNS management through tools like Terraform, Pulumi, etc which most registrars won't offer. So there is a lot to like about CloudFlare. They do support a small set of TLDs for registration however, so keep that in mind (but of course if you register elsewhere you can always point it to cloudflare for DNS management).

The best DNS Management imho is AWS Route53. It expects technical knowledge, it isn't for someone setting up a squarespace site. But if you are very technical and want all the levers and power at your fingertips with great CLI, IaC, and API support (plus powerful GUI) then it is the best. Plus they have a ton of power features like georouting and roud-robin and other routing rules. But it comes at a cost of 50¢ a month, which to me is worth it but for some people they might prefer a completely free option.

But... with that being said, i wouldn't recommend registering a domain through AWS. Its really difficult to manage and the pricing is the highest in the industry (second only to GoDaddy's criminally predatory bait-and-switch renewal prices)

Whatever you do, don't use GoDaddy.

Shady business practices, generally horrible service.

I still don't understand how they maintain their market dominance. I only surmise that it must be non technically literate folks buying from them. They spend alot on marketing compared to the rest.

Porkbun is good. Hover is good. Gandi.net was good when I used them, but I've heard some rumblings of issues but I've never been able to fully substantiate, that said, they got bought out by a company that makes some justifiably wary.

Cloudflare is good if you don't mind using their nameservers only (they sell domains at cost, its a marketing vector for them).

I've used all of these directly and had no issues. If you want the most flexibility, I'd go with Porkbun or Hover. Being the most recent I've worked with, beside Cloudflare (which I loved, but some don't like being forced to use their DNS. you can turn the proxy stuff off), they were good experiences.

Haven't used Namecheap. I know some people like them, but also heard mixed reviews too, I'm always on the fence about them.

Yeah while this sale further tainted the little trust I had in Google, I'm not worrying about migrating quite yet. Squarespace does what they do very well, and I suspect they'll absorb this business of Google's seamlessly.

Now if they sold to, say, GoDaddy? I'd be in a rush to ditch the platform fast.

Namecheap is one of the worst. I keep saying here how I managed to persuade a rep to remove my MFA over chat and they didn't do proper auth. Look at NameBright - cheap and has a great new beta interface and it has an API as well.

I have a ton of domains on Namecheap and have been using them for 10-15 years. Their business has gone downhill significantly in the past 5 years or so.

The MFA is a joke. I recovered a client's MFA myself with almost no effort. It worked out since didn't properly set up MFA anyway and needed to get it unlocked and set up correctly, but I was shocked how easy it was to pretend to be someone with them. They disabled someone else's MFA with only me confirming a DNS record (which i looked up publicly using dig), plus the name and password of the account. It was scary easy.

At one point many years back they decided to stop supporting Authy as their MFA provider and tried to move everyone to their namecheap app, which would be used as a second factor. But the app was so terribly broken and I got locked out of my account multiple times because the app would crash on newer iPhones for a while, so I couldn't access my account. This must have been super common because they disabled MFA for me by just confirming a code sent to my phone. I assume this was a widespread problem and they might have eased up MFA deactivation rules for a time since there were probably a lot of people locked out of accounts.

Luckily now, they use mainstream 2FA codes, so you can use any app you want. But the process has already scarred me.

Overall, Namecheap has deteriorated to all the problems that Godaddy orginally had. The bait-and-switch renewal prices, clunky UI, slower nameservers, and upsells upsells everywhere for email hosting and everything else.

So after about 15 years of namecheap, I will be finding a new home sometime this year for all my domains.

You don't have to proxy records in cloudflare.

Cloud flare will require you to use their DNS, but not their cdn.

I've been using Nearly Free Speech for more than a decade as my registrar. I split DNS between them and Cloudflare.

I haven't seen NFS recommended on this site in years but it used to be mentioned fairly regularly.

Not the cheapest and the UI is very clunky, but it's also zero bullshit.

The biggest thing I will miss about Google Domains is the security model. I was fairly confident that my TFA Google account would never get password reset or socially engineered to take over a domain. I know nothing about Squarespace and there honestly aren't many large companies with the same high security track record as Google. Sure, folks lose their accounts but it's through automated abuse-detection or loss of credentials and not takeover. Probably AWS is the next best choice security-wise.

> Even more surprisingly was that Tucows – the domain registrar with the third most domains globally – wasn’t mentioned even once.

Tucows doesn't sell domains under their own name. They are the parent company of Hover, which is the brand they do direct sales under. Tucows is at number 5 on the list. (They also have other subsidiaries specifically for resellers.)

I have really liked pair.com (pair networks) for domains, email, and hosting. They have been reliable and no-nonsense and reasonably priced, for a long time. Based in Pittsburgh, PA, I believe.

I like Njalla so far, which really is just a proxy for Namecheap or whatever other registrar they use. I'm not really sure how much sense it makes to use them though.

anyone knows how to find resellers? you can find the list of registrars on https://www.icann.org/en/accredited-registrars&ved=2ahUKEwj5... but it doesn't include resellers

updated link https://www.icann.org/en/accredited-registrars

I use AWS because most of my stuff is there anyway and they have an API I can use to modify the A/AAAA records automatically

That has been my argument in favor of Route53/AWS for a while. They have the best API for updating dns records, plus powerful well-supported CLI tools and they have first-class integrations with all Infrastructure-as-code tools (Terraform, Pulumi, etc). So for the "real" dev experience, you aren't going to beat the support of Route53.

yes yes, amazon is evil. I get it, but for domain management and DNS, its worth standing in the shadow of Goliath sometimes, even if you don't love everything else about them.

I've been using joker.com for a long time. Straightforward interface, no spam, stable.

I'm curious about the 79.4 of other's marketshare.

a lot of domain registrars are seeing transfers as the.com is increasing 7% per year and the cost is passed to the consumer

verisign the company owning .com tld has a 49% profit margin and increasing.

what about selfhosters who need to use a dynamic dns which is best for that?

I use moniker

Misk!!!

GoDaddy: Big, safe and reasonable for just domains.

Honorable mention: Namecheap

Source: 23+ years of web building experience.

I bought a great domain name from Namecheap, after which they voided the purchase and made it a $1,500 premium domain. Other folks have pointed out that this may not have been malice on their part, but incompetence. In any case, I recommend avoiding them.

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