I've been using Hover for 7 or so years by now and have had no issues; I've always been able to do whatever I need to do at a registrar easily, cleanly and quic

I've been using Hover for 7 or so years by now and have had no issues; I've always been able to do whatever I need to do at a registrar easily, cleanly and quickly. I also use it as my main domain search (both logged in and logged out) and have never had any issues of a domain being snatched after I searched for it. While I'm at it, here are some more anecdotes. I started on casual web dev in the late 90s and started with Network Solutions because that was the only registrar for a .com back in the days. They were OK at first, but after registrars opened up it was apparent they wanted to maintain being the most expensive option. By early 2010s I moved my main domains away and ran into a lot of difficulties moving; they make you jump through enough hoops I'm guessing in hopes you'd give up. It was not a good experience. In the early 2000s when registrars first started opening up I also had a couple of domains on Joker. They were cheap and kind of ok but for many years their site was consistently very slow. Eventually I also started having a lot of account issues there. In the end I stopped using them by virtue of me stopping work on the sites using the domains I registered at Joker. One of my startups in the 2010s, my cofounder used domain.com as a registrar. It was not good. We would have tons of issues with any sort of DNS or nameserver config, things wouldn't work or propagate correctly, and so on. I don't have a take on whether they are trustworthy or not, but there were just tons of technical issues. I've also briefly used Gandi once for a specific TLD my startup needed to use, and in my limited experience there wasn't any issues.