CVC acquires majority stake in Namecheap for $1.5B | Hacker News Reader

CVC acquires majority stake in Namecheap for $1.5B

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91 pointsajdude48 comments

Private equity seems to be a form of cancer that slowly sucks the life out of everything it touches, with a single goal: to grow and spread. Can someone more knowledgeable please explain to me why I'm wrong?

The reason it's easy to conclude that they're evil is because they are almost never committed to preserving or improving the quality of their investees. They are only committed to making money, and that often comes in the form of price gouging and liquidation.

(not my views, playing devils advocate)

PE strives to make things more efficient from a capital point of view. Business foois making $X in profit, and the PE firm's analysis says the can make X+Y dollars with some changes. This is 'better' because now the capital usage is more efficient and more can be spent in other places - new products, new jobs, new businesses, returns to investors, etc. And of course returns to the PE firm.

In principle an efficient economy is important on a macro scale - if all the business are stuck in how they were doing things 30 years ago then we would have reduced innovation and ultimately less jobs.

In practice there is of course a lot of money that flows back into the PE boss's pockets and.... thats it.

It trades robustness for efficiency. It makes the business/service altogether less robust, unable to withstand shocks, unable to survive the tests of time.

It shortens the outlook from years to months.

Have you seen “Other peoples money” with Danny de Vito? I felt it explains this cancer quite well, 35 years ago.

Efficiency?

The classic playbook includes making a lot of debt, and then leaving the lenders holding the bag when the company files for bankruptcy. It can only be considered efficient if con artistry is efficient, that is, efficient at taking the money from the hands of people who trust other people "too much".

This is over simplistic and if everyone knew this is what happens when PE comes into play then no one would lend to PE-backed companies. Often times these debts can work out.

Work out for the banks and shareholders yeah. Not the company and its employees

Private equity has been a cancer for the web hosting community. A single firm bought the top two control panels (cPanel and Plesk), the top virtualization solution (SolusVM), and the top billing software (WHMCS). And each year the prices are raised further and further with no real investment. It's forced a lot of smaller providers out and caused prices for customers to skyrocket. And you have to put up with it because the alternatives still aren't quite as good, or you're too locked in.

It's the same for hosting companies. A single PE firm (Endurance) owns over two dozen hosting and domain firms. The first thing they do is lay off the staff (because they already have outsourced agents) and strip the bits away until it's nothing more than a shell with a name for one of their other platforms.

PE is a cancer, and I don't even know if I can count one that has ever been a net positive for a company. All they care about is extracting more and more until all that's left is a stone.

Goddamnit, I just moved everything to Namecheap to avoid more outages. Anyone have other recommendations in the event of the likely private equity rot?

If all you care about is avoiding outages and price then it is hard to beat cloudflare.

iirc Cloudflare doesn't act like a normal registrar, however. You cannot use anyone except Cloudflare for your DNS provider.

Looks like easyDNS and Porkbun are recommended.

(May have to test the waters at each.)

I highly recommend Porkbun. Very consistently great for almost a decade now.

I have domains on namecheap that are over a decade old. Time means nothing.

I've been using Gandi for years and recently have been consolidating things there. In the past I've used Google and still have some stuff and Namecheap too.

Gandi is a little more expensive, but are consistently excellent. Especially now with their new UX and org support, it's super easy to manage domains from both corporate and personal accounts with one login.

Gandi was also bought out by private equity a few years ago, as far as I know their service is still fine but they keep raising their prices without any rhyme or reason. They want $38 to renew a .com now, and despite those price hikes they also rugpulled users of their previously-included email service by turning it into a paid add-on.

Look forward to Namecheap heading the same way in a few years!

Oh yeah? Dammit, I must have missed that news. That sucks. :-(

I’m happy with Porkbun.

I switched to porkbun for some work stuff and really like it

Looks like easyDNS was recommended.

Please do not turn NameCheap to shit, CVC. It was a lot of effort to make the move when NameSecure... turned to shit.

oh sweet summer child.

we are asking a shark to spare their appetite of goodwill to their food.

For anyone wondering: "the deal covers both Namecheap and its sister platform, Spaceship."

Should link to original article - https://www.wsj.com/business/deals/cvc-strikes-1-5-billion-d...

https://archive.ph/i9vOk

Ugh, all my domains are with Namecheap, since Google stopped dealing with domains and CloudFlare and GoDaddy seem more evil. Also I appreciated Namecheap's support of Ukraine.

Hopefully it's not too predatory and the owner just wanted to cash out some chips; some corps do okay under private equity (Suse for example) but lots get ripped to shreds...

What is the simplest, and least path of resistance to starting my own Registrar? Do I have to pay a fee for each TLDs, gTLDs that I want to be able to make it available for registration?

Become an ICANN-accredited registrar. This unlocks direct access to gTLD registries and their registry-registrar agreements, which contain provisions for registrar pricing and notice of fee changes.

Good for Namecheap. They're still my default when I'm searching for new domains, even though I end up registering somewhere else (their bulk search is still best in class imo).

I'm a bit surprised at their revenue numbers considering domain registration is pretty much a commodity at this point. I always assumed non-technical people would first go to a web host/email provider that lets them buy a domain vs. a domain registrar that also supports email and web hosting. Clearly I'd be wrong.

> surprised at their revenue numbers

I suppose that web and email hosting, and "security services" constitute a large part of it. Domain registration is not necessarily even the biggest part.

Good for namecheap, bad for everyone else.

> Richard Kirkendall, founder and CEO of Namecheap, will remain with the company, retaining a significant shareholding and continuing to oversee its operations.

I hope Mr. Kirkendall would continue to oversea its operations and continue to pay its employs a good salary.

https://www.glassdoor.co.uk/Salary/Namecheap-Ukraine-Salarie...

Literally just renewed domains with them hours ago. Worrying that this is being seen as an acquisition worthy space

Soon they will change their name to namexpensive… time to move on to other options not managed by vampires

Are there guides on how to move domains from Namecheap to whoever the new recommended provider is?

Typically you just need to unlock the domain, obtain an authorization code from your current registrar, and then initiate the transfer process with the new registrar.

Side: Namecheap’s CEO used to be pretty active on HN till recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=namecheapceo

Shit I have domains there. Anyone have recommendations for a good cheap registrar that supports .io?

Porkbun

namesilo has been decent for me

Another private equity acquisition. Hooray!

So looks like I should move my domains, what's the recommendation

I advise people to use porkbun generally. Personally I use and like EasyDNS, though their UI is a little quirky.

njal.la! famously founded by a co-founder of TPB. great prices, great privacy. probably among the least likely registrars to ever sell out to PE

Do you think they have an enshttifying strategy before hand? Or do you think they just get in there and McKinsey their way to a worse product on the fly?

It can be either, but in both cases the ultimate goals are the same: increase efficiency. So if they buy multiple domain registrars then they can share infrastructure and staff and become more efficient.

Or, without merging companies they can simply change the goal from growth to efficiency and "make do with less" and then that naturally leads to enshitification.

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