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Comment by happytoexplain | Hacker News Reader

Just a few weeks ago I moved from Namecheap to Porkbun. That's not an advertisement - I simply Googled popular registrars. But it is an indictment of Namecheap. They are going the way of GoDaddy. Please move away from them immediately. They are shifting to short-term strategies (high prices, immoral data practices, etc).

Edit: Apparently they were bought by private equity just weeks before I noticed something was wrong. Not a coincidence, I'm sure. We need to legally destroy private equity takeovers. They are pure evil and nothing but a negative force, at least in the USA.

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Is it time to change registrars already? I fled Gandi a while ago because of private equity fuckery. And now I need to go somewhere else. Who won't adopt enshitification-as-a-business-plan for a few years?

No wonder people are leaving tech to go be goat farmers.

Gandi got EXPENSIVE which is unfortunate because they often had TLDs no one else had first. I'm still with them for a single domain. Once Cloudflare supports .se, I'm outta there!

namecheap has had a mixed reputation for several years now. when i took over responsibility for a domain registered on namecheap the first thing i did was move it off there (to gandi, because that was before gandi was sold) because i heard some problematic stories about namecheap. it baffles me everytime i see namecheap recommended.

Namecheap was one of the popular alternatives to GoDaddy, recommended by techies. That's changed now, but I'm not surprised people haven't all caught up to its new reputation.

> Who won't adopt enshitification-as-a-business-plan for a few years?

I don't have a crystal ball, but NearlyFreeSpeech was recommended to me in 2010 and I've been using it since 2012. I don't think it's changed at all in that time.

https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/services/domains

https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/services/respect

Their FAQ says they use Public Domain Registry to actually buy the domains. They are a wholly owned subsidiary of The Endurance International Group, who is owned by Clearlake Capital, a PE firm! So while it may shield you a bit, if you're moving from namecheap just to avoid PE then that may not be the most obvious choice.

https://faq.nearlyfreespeech.net/q/difftos

https://publicdomainregistry.com/about-us/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clearlake_Capital

Thanks for digging into this. Somehow I'd never checked. I moved my domains to porkbun since I wasn't otherwise using NFS for anything else.

I use NFS for hosting, and I agree they are still good. But it's just a matter of time. Always be ready to move.

I am also looking for something that will last for a good while.

What makes you think the same can't happen with Porkbun?

I never implied that. It seems unrelated to what I said.

The question remains without your implication.

It may, but what’s that got to do with moving away from namecheap?

Namecheap is not even cheap for names anymore, their renewal prices made me transfer elsewhere

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