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Comment by dlss | Hacker News Reader

I've never heard of namecheap, but given their name I'm surprised they charge so much more than gandi.net ($39).

Is it normal for a company branded as the low cost provider to charge above market for rare goods?

Maybe that's the price of free speech. Namecheap doesn't have any unusual restrictions on what you do with your domain after you buy it. Gandi does. You have to uphold their ethical code and affirmatively fight "deviant uses of the internet" to register domains through them. Hacker News would violate that code, and under the terms of Gandi's service agreement, they could revoke service and cancel this domain if it were registered through them.

http://en.gandi.net/static/contracts/en/g2/pdf/MSA-1.3-EN.pd...

I really appreciate you posting this information. I had considered Gandi in the past and would not have read their ToS; I'll stay away now.

As for our friend jjblue, you can safely ignore his citation trolling. The rest of us appreciate the warning. There's no point in waiting for victim #1 before telling your friends about danger. Thanks again!

Deviant uses is defined as "spamming, phishing, hacking, cracking, or attempts at hacking or cracking". That's a pretty standard ToS right?

Not at all. Neither is that the extent of the agreement. You agree that you will not use your domain to distribute any information in violation of their ethical code. You agree that you'll also police any 3rd parties with the ability to publish content (i.e. blog comments or forum posts). The list of things you can't talk about on your site include anything "prejudicial", not just illegal. It includes any discussion that doesn't respect the "image" and "honor" of any other person. It includes any discussion inappropriate to the "age and sensibility" of anyone the site is meant to be read by.

That's all from section 3.3 of the agreement. Making your ownership of your domain name contingent upon active monitoring and censorship to uphold ambiguous "moral standards" of a 3rd party is NOT a standard registrar ToS.

You've posted this msg at least twice in the thread (at least one was deleted). Seems you're using the thread in a way that doesn't help HN as much as yourself.

Can you post some examples of this policy being used unfairly? Surely some real-world, verifiable examples would help your case. (And what if the examples are nonexistent... what then?)

Domain registration is a commodity service, where all but one company selling this commodity does so without any strange contract terms. Even if the chance that Gandi acts on their contractual rights is slim, there's no reason to give them that right in the first place. A company's brand, good will and years of backlinks are tied to their domain -- it's not something to put at risk lightly.

I deleted the copy of my comment, not a moderator, as it didn't need to be said twice. This does not "help me" in any way; I'm not affiliated with any registrar. The reasons one would point out an unusual contract term are pretty obvious -- most people don't read them, and this one's quite material to the decision of who to register a domain with.

Don't pretend that Gandi is unique. Even if such specific language isn't in their legalese blob, Godaddy has arbitrarily yanked domains many times. And I'm betting that most low margin registrars would simply turn tail if threatened with expensive lawsuits.

So no examples, then? Sounds like FUD to me.

We call companies out on their ToS all the time, even if there's no provable harm that has happened in the past. If it's in the contract, they both intend to use it and have the legal right to use it. I'd rather not that that chance, personally.

I appreciate the strange terms being brought to my attention. I don't have time to worry about a company morally and subjectively policing the product I bought from them. The TOS is not a place to be clever and funny and this information has helped inform a decision for me. Just because you happen to not care doesn't mean other don't.

Surely it would be unwise to agree to an outlandish contractual item purely on the grounds that one hasn't seen it invoked yet.

And surely it is a good thing to bring it to the attention of people who aren't likely to read every word of a 20 page contract just to buy a domain name.

I use namecheap for all of my domains (all transferred off of GoDaddy). Not sure about getting .io TLD from them, but otherwise their service is really good and prices are very competitive. It also doesn't have the stupid amount of dark patterns that GoDaddy has.

And 100% fewer girls in swimsuits, elephant hunters, and SOPA supporters.

Namecheap is just an eNom reseller[1]. They simply use the eNom API to handle all domain management and registration. Their prices are dictated by the prices given to them by eNom.

Their business is low margin, high volume.

[1]http://www.namecheap.com/support/knowledgebase/troubleshoote...

Namecheap is an accredited domain registrar, they started out as an eNom reseller and still maintains that account.

They still register all of their domains through eNom.

If you could find a citation for that, I think we'd be happy. You don't become a registered ICANN registrar if you're reselling from eNom.

I've been an exclusive Namecheap user since RegisterFly screwed me out of thousands of dollars worth of domains back in 2004 with their whole fraud thing... Have been very happy customer of theirs. Great company, plus they are Anti-SOPA, having been very helpful to GoDaddy users looking to leave them when that drama went down.

They've made multiple (not insignificant) donations to the EFF as well.

After the SOPA escapades, they became my primary registrar away from GoDaddy. So far i'm actually pretty happy with their service.

> Is it normal for a company branded as the low cost provider to charge above market for rare goods?

At least I would not be surprised if that would be the case... like those red and white "SALE" stickers that some shops have at their windows during the whole year, while being actually more expensive than other shops.

namecheap is my preferred vendor and is generally cheap, as the name suggests. Their interface is great and their customer service tends to be pretty good. They're miles ahead of other popular registrars like godaddy and netsol.

I have no idea what io is or why the people at ICANN or wherever are allowing all these new subdomains. Its clearly a cash grab by all involved and the registrars are feeling out the market value of yet another vanity domain. I'm sure it'll settle into a more crowd-friendly price. Not sure what the point is. Just more domains businesses need to worry about. I'm sure Disney doesn't want some random jackass to own Disney.io.

.io is the CCTLD for the British Indian Ocean Territory.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.io

Abusing foreign domains for vanity purposes is still the ugly greed I'm complaining about. Especially the geniuses who would buy domains attached to anti-enlightenment, anti-liberal cultures that can pull your product/site for any caveman reason.

While I agree there are some bad examples of TLD abuse, the British Indian Ocean Territory is not so much a country as a military outpost. The native inhabitants were forcibly removed decades ago, and in the very unlikely event they were ever repatriated I think it's unlikely they would stick with the name "British Indian Ocean Territory". The TLD .io would essentially go unused if foreign registration weren't allowed.

Whatever the name, they provide a good service. I have an .io domain with Gandi but if Namecheap was offering io domains while i was shopping for it I would have went with them.

I think it's just the name. In many ways they don't act like a typical low cost provider. For example, they accept bitcoin.

And Gandi isn't that cheap to begin with...

Really? Where is it cheaper to buy an IO domain?

Really curious not trying to be snarky, I have some projects I'd like to put on that domain for fun but $40 or more dollars isn't worth it.

Namecheap is appreciably less expensive than Gandi for nearly all other TLDs.

For example, .COM: $10.69 vs $15.50.

moniker.com has a $13 offer for .io right now

https://www.moniker.com/co-domain/

That link is for .co, not .io domains...

Apologies, my mistake. Also, when talking about Gandi's pricing I was speaking generally, i.e. they are more expensive than average domain registrars. I've, however, bought domains from them myself and their support and admin are great, so I would totally recommend them.

Kind of a dumb comment considering that Namecheap is appreciably less expensive than Gandi for nearly every other TLD.

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