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Comment by EasyMark | Hacker News Reader

If you use your own domain, open source software, and backup often they can't lock you up forever like Google/Microsoft/Apple tho

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You're missing my point that you're still beholden to the domain name registrar that manages your domain name on your behalf. That account getting permanently locked out will have all the same bad consequences for your online life as your Google account getting locked out.

And keep in mind that being a domain name registrar is a low margin business (typically they're only grossing a few bucks per domain per year, before accounting for any other expenses like staffing and systems), so you're not gonna get great support.

My understandingis is that legally you own the domain and the registrar is only managing it on your behalf and they are required to transfer it to another registrar if they terminate you as a customer. As recently happened for russian users on namecheap for example.

This. My TOTP 2FA for Namecheap just stopped working one day, despite nothing changing. I was totally locked out. I got lucky and their support was helpful and we reset it after a few hours, but it made me realize that there is no way to be 100% safe.

(My Google account is dead even though I have the username, password and recovery email which forwards to me since I don't have the phone number)

At some level, every business has incentives to minimize what they provide you vs what you provide them. But even low margin businesses where you’re the customer are more likely to have incentives and structures built around paying attention to you than low margin per user businesses where users aren’t the customer but part of the product.

I don’t think anyone is arguing that they can get away from the chain of trust required to operate in the modern world.

I believe they are advocating for minimizing risk by not deeply integrating with capricious cloud providers.

I host my own email service and several times have had the registrars get sold and once sold and then the purchasing registry discontinued the registry service, or maybe the secondary DNS. They generally have support that at least understands how DNS works, which I find surprisingly rare among tech folks.

However the big problem is I am frequently banned from emailing gmail or office365. Never Apple for some reason. So I can read email but I can’t that well send it. But I don’t really care much, mostly people have to tell me out of band to check my email if they have sent me email. My email sessions are mostly a review of current spam practices and questionable emails from firms I have done business with.

The backup for that is a registered trademark on the domain. Recovery via ICANN procedures is slow, though.

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