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Comment by backendanon | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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