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Don't use NameCheap for the .fr TLD
- preommr 3y ago> Don’t ever use namecheap for any kind of domains. It is the second worse domain registrar exists When did this happen? Anecdotally, in recent years, I've seen namecheap be the primary recommendation for a domain registrar. When did the public opinion shift like this?
- azemetre 3y agoYeah that was weird to hear. I’ve been using Namecheap for over ten years. I have around 100 domains. Had no issues, never transferred a domain tho. I also don’t use any other services they have.
- WarOnPrivacy 3y ago> I have around 100 domains. Had no issues 20+ years, fewer domains. Their expiration process is generous. That said, some international domains they sell have a poorly handled expiration process (as noted by the OP). Their upstream provider has a crappy+short grace system. I think NC could offset the harm by having the expiration 30+ days sooner but they don't. > I also don’t use any other services they have. I tried mail their mail hosting 10 years ago. They use an open source server and app plugin to mimic Outlook push. It was a disaster and my customer was not happy with me. I stick to domains, DNS and DDNS now.
- dangus 3y agoThe truth of the matter is that namecheap does exactly what it says in the name. I rarely find a cheaper domain name elsewhere. OP gave us good information on what to do if you’re in this situation but to be frank, the entire situation is their fault. If you are using a domain for your email you need to protect it with your life. No working payment method no auto-renew, that’s on you. Namecheap emails you reminders at 30 days and 15 days ahead of time. “My phone was broken” is a lame excuse: get your ass to the library if you have to. In my case, I bought my renewals numerous years ahead of time. The price is only going to get higher anyway, might as well buy them now.
- hu3 3y ago> Besides, Namecheap isn't cheap anymore. I've been using it for years but recently moved to Cloudflare as the renewal of my .com domain was 50% more expensive on Namecheap. Reminder: move my domains from Namecheap to Cloudflare if prices are indeed lower.
- Kognito 3y agoCloudflare sells domains at cost so yeah, they’re cheaper. Downside is they don’t have as extensive TLD support as Namecheap, but they’re slowly improving.
- ehhthing 3y agoCloudFlare domains is a bit of an underbaked product, it's not bad but you should be aware that you cannot change your root nameservers . They must be CloudFlare. The only way to change them is to switch registrars.
- KingOfCoders 3y agoWanted to move away from Namecheap for quite some time tried some other registrars but not really happy (e.g. Porkbun) (Moved all my DNS to BunnyCDN at least). I need PDF invoices with VAT/VAT-excemption sent to me for business reasons. Most have only an HTML which often gets wrangled with Print-to-PDF. Some don't have invoices at all :-( [Edit] Got a comment on Reddit to try inwx.de - moved one domain, they seem to have PDF invoices in mail, 90s UI (which is a good thing ;-) and very technical status update messages (which is also a good thing)
- steelbrain 3y agoCurious re Porkbun, what were the negative aspects of your experience?
- KingOfCoders 3y agoNo PDF invoices at that time.
- mrbn100ful 3y agoI have this on my PDF OVH invoice file: Invoice n°FRxxxxxxx of January 30, 2024 Total invoice excluding tax €4.99 VAT (20%) €1.00 Total invoice including tax 5.99 Subscription €7.79 Offers -€2.80 Price excluding tax €4.99 VAT (20%) €1.00 Total including tax €5.99
- KingOfCoders 3y agoThanks, does OVH send these invoices or do you need to log in?
- remram 3y agoI get a link by email, the PDF has to be retrieved from the web portal. That PDF has my name and address at the top though.
- 3y ago
- p4bl0 3y agoThe worst domain name story that happened to me was with my .name domain name, the one I still use for my personal web page. When I got it, it was only allowed to register subdomains in the form of firstname.lastname.name and I even had to provide my ID card to be able to register the domain name. The deal then was that I could use DNS zone of the subdomain, and in addition got an email redirection from firstname@lastname.name to whatever email address I would choose. A few years after that, VeriSign suddenly stopped supporting the email redirection feature, with not even a single warning sent to customers like me. From one day to another, I lost the main email address I used to communicate and for all of my online accounts. It was a mess to deal with this. To this day, I was never able to get hold of my lastname.name, to be able to restore my email address. Even though I'm the only one in the world using a subdomain of it. The only solution that has ever been suggested to me by VeriSign customer support would be to let it expire, and hope that no squatting bots get it before me so once the grace period expires, I can try to register the first-level domain. But that would mean several weeks where my website would be down, and all that with the uncertainty of actually being able to actually get it back.
- rsoto 3y agoSo you got sold a subdomain? That's a new one for me.
- dmurray 3y agoIs it any different from getting a .co.uk domain, really?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- badgersnake 3y agoThat was the original idea behind .name. You buy firstname.lastname.name. When it wasn’t a huge success they got bored and it reverted to a regular tld.
- jdjsbsvvc 3y agoNamecheap has gone downhill imho meaning it is no longer the best discount registrar. Meanwhile some more registrars have popped up in the past five years that have better service and are cheaper. Porkbun is one. I also had great experience with namesilo. The only reason I could see people going with nanecheap is they already have an account there or they listen to other people who haven’t evaluated the registrar situation lately.
- enkay 3y agoBetween the desperately slow web app and awful customer support, I don't understand how anyone uses or recommends namecheap. Cloudflare is the go to unless they don't have the tld.
- paulgb 3y agoCareful with Cloudflare, they don't let you change nameservers[1]: > Registrant agrees to use Cloudflare’s nameservers. REGISTRANT ACKNOWLEDGES AND AGREES THAT IT MAY NOT CHANGE THE NAMESERVERS ON THE REGISTRAR SERVICES, AND THAT IT MUST TRANSFER TO A THIRD PARTY REGISTRAR IF IT WISHES TO CHANGE NAMESERVERS. So it's a no-go if you want to use Route 53 or something like that. [1] https://www.cloudflare.com/domain-registration-agreement/ https://www.cloudflare.com/domain-registration-agreement/
- throwawaaarrgh 3y agoCheck tld-list.com and porkbun.com when looking for a domain to register, you'll often find cheaper than elsewhere That said, I wouldn't use a registrar that didn't have good reviews, and I'd look at security policy, privacy policy, renew price, features list, and support options. Sometimes it's worth paying more. After you have the domain, if it's important to you, try to get support to change it for you or recover your account without a valid email address. You'd be amazed how easy it is to compromise many registrars through support. And set up auto renew... Once it's gone, you'll regret it.
- slig 3y agoThey're trigger happy, see this [0]. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30506581 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30506581
- WarOnPrivacy 3y agoI'd wager that was part of NC learning how to turn around their long history of being a safe registrar of crapware and malicious domains. I nearly moved my domains away from NC 15 years ago, when I submitted documentation about key domains for malware distribution. NC support blew off my report because they weren't hosting the malware itself. That long period of ugliness has gotten better.
- orenlindsey 3y agoGoogle domains was the best registrar while it lasted. Sad that Google killed it.
- throw_m239339 3y agoGandi used to be great too, with free (or at least very cheap) mail servers too IIRC, then they were bought out... edit: officially, merged with TWS https://domainnamewire.com/2023/03/02/total-web-solutions-acquires-domain-registrar-gandi-forming-new-entity/ https://domainnamewire.com/2023/03/02/total-web-solutions-ac...
- leononame 3y agoGandi were bought out? By anyone reputable? I've got all my domains with them, I don't wanna get caught up in any shenanigans
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- sea-gold 3y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35080777 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35080777
- abcd_f 3y agoShenanigans are forthcoming, guaranteed. I had 30+ domains with them, a client of 20 years and a true fanboy, referred dozens of friends. I wouldn't touch them with a long pole now. Moved all to Porkbun and INWX.
- p4bl0 3y agoThey were bought by TWS and prices changed suddenly. Many things that were included with domains like email account became paid options, and expansive. I had a dozen of domains with them for years (more than 15) and made a lot of people go to them. Yet, I moved everything out at that time, and helped friends and acquaintances to move out to. Staying there would have cost me several hundreds of additional euros per year. I move some of my domains to OVH, and some other to Infomaniak (I already had domains registered with both of them and am a very happy customer of both).
- Takennickname 3y agoNamecheap have been gaslighting people for years about implementing 2fa. When they finally rolled it out, it was a piece of crap in house built solution that couldn't properly send an SMS half the time. I remember them saying they were gonna roll out TOTP "in February" and five februaries past at which point route 53 was pretty mainstream so I moved all my domains. Incredibly dishonest or incompetent company.
- nolongerthere 3y agoRoute53 is by far the most expensive DR for all the tlds I looked at, was your only consideration convenience?
- Takennickname 3y agoIt also unfortunately doesn't support a lot of tlds. I have to use different registrars for that. As far as I remember, the standard average price for a .com back then was like $10 and route 53 was $12. Wasn't a big problem considering how robust the dns panel was compared to everything else at the time.
- Symbiote 3y agoFor a business with only a few domains, but using AWS for any other services, the convenience of having them in Route 53 is worth the small additional cost. Our most recent renewal cost $12.
- abofh 3y agoAgreed - just mildly annoying it gets invoiced separately instead of being bundled in a monthly line-item, but I'm sure there's some contractual reason it has to be that way.
- asah 3y agobummer. I haven't had trouble with their 2FA solution and in fact they were one of the first to implement (working + practical) FIDO support. IIRC, I turned that on even before Google. that said, I haven't tried them for key recovery yet... and hope I never have to!
- noirscape 3y agoMoved away from them in general two years ago. Their past behavior has shown a severe lack of care for their customer data[0]. Nowadays I use Porkbun + a local provider for the ccTLD belonging to my own country. Perhaps a stark reminder that with cheap prices, you get treated like a cheap customer. [0]: The CEO encouraging an activist hacker/criminal to pentest their webportal without any sort of contract or anything in place to prevent them from leaking out their findings and instead going by "lol, time to shitpost about it on twitter" energy is shameful.
- rekoil 3y agoSame here.
- kybernetyk 3y agoI think it’s an Euro quirk. My .de domains can’t be renewed if they expire in less than 7 days. Just don’t deal with euro domains. I learned it the hard way and moved to .com
- timvdalen 3y agoI have a ton of Euro domains, and I've never heard of having to manually renew them within a specified time period.
- isodev 3y agoI think this still depends on the registrar in question. Most of my domains are .be or .eu and they (thankfully) renew just fine even in the last minutes of the last hour before they expire (that was close).
- legrande 3y agoAs a rule of thumb, I never register a ccTLD. You don't know the Geo-politics and baggage that TLD is under. Some countries are incredibly unstable, and that could be reflected in the ccTLD. The only exception is if you are a resident of that country and have a valid passport to reflect you live in that country, and that the domain can be claimed & validated because you live there. Sometimes ccTLDs bind you to a country you don't live in, and it also signals that you may like/honor that country's practices and history (which you probably don't). What I do is, choose generic TLDs like .blog and .dev. In the past .tk was considered low-rep because it was free, and it raised red flags, so at least pay for a domain. They're the same price as a T-Shirt!
- Symbiote 3y agoThat can hardly apply to .FR — no-one uses that for domain hacks, it's from a very stable country, and has very wide use within that country. I'd rather suggest that using the very cheapest service providers means you're risking problems when you need customer support — in this case because notifications were missed due to a broken phone or whatever.
- foofie 3y ago> The only exception is if you are a resident of that country and have a valid passport to reflect you live in that country, and that the domain can be claimed & validated because you live there. Isn't that the whole purpose of ccTLDs? In fact, are you sure that your use case for ccTLDs for countries you have no connection with is actually allowed or legitimate? Every single time I registered a ccTLD the registrar required me to provide documentation that attested I had in fact a relationship with said country, either a valid passport or business details. Frankly, I thought any other scenario was automatically deemed invalid.
- Algent 3y agoI can confirm you need some kind of legal address (person or company) in France to register a .fr domain.
- 3y ago
- buro9 3y agomy worst domain story is of Gandi hosting microco.sm , the .sm is San Marino, and the domain costs €300 per year as a special business domain. but... halfway through last year (in May) the domain was suspended, and as DNS caches expired the domain became increasingly unavailable. I used microco.sm to host an OSS forum platform, and this instance runs over 300 domains. what then happened was a scramble... Gandi support were effectively non-existent and I was against the clock for those caches expiring. full incident thread written in public view: https://www.lfgss.com/conversations/386644/ https://www.lfgss.com/conversations/386644/ I effectively cut over to a spare domain, but wow... 14h of incident, and about 1h3m of outage, but this was a SaaS platform that had run successfully for more than a decade prior... so that domain name was hard-coded everywhere, and I needed to change everything. it's an insane DR recovery, I'm not sure losing your primary domain as a SaaS service is on anyone's failure mode, I'm pleased I could respond and get this done... but wow. root cause? Gandi never said, but a few threads elsewhere on the internet from a few individuals impacted who were Italian suggested that Gandi had failed to pay their annual registration with nic.sm and so nic.sm suspended all .sm domains that Gandi managed... totally unbelievable and also very believable.
- ziml77 3y agoI tried to find info on this and ended up in a 2018 HN thread which links to a similar incident but with 101domain instead of Gandi: https://puri.sm/posts/the-great-purism-dns-outage-of-2018/ https://puri.sm/posts/the-great-purism-dns-outage-of-2018/ Makes me wonder if San Marino was at fault in both of these incidents.
- buro9 3y agolooks like it... it looks like San Marino has a very solid response for lack of payment, and that is damaging to the real end users / customers of registrar services
- imnotreallynew 3y agoSomewhat related, but does anyone know how to deal with a .us domain? There is no WHOIS privacy with that TLD. A few hours after I bought a .us domain, I started receiving phone calls from all over the world, literally every 5-10 minutes for days, offering services for my “new business” associated with the TLD. Is there any way to keep legitimate contacts in the registrar without getting a ton of spam?
- elashri 3y ago> Is there any way to keep legitimate contacts in the registrar without getting a ton of spam? There is a ruling that prevents hiding the .us domain registration and contact information or using anonymizing proxy [1] Your information must be public. Maybe you can try national do not call registry [2] and see if it helps in this particular case. [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A7251-2005Mar4.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A7251-2005Mar... [2] https://www.donotcall.gov https://www.donotcall.gov
- edent 3y agoIsn't the real lesson "pay for multi-year registration"? Or "make sure your have auto-renew on"? Or perhaps "add funds to your account to pay for critical services"? Or even "put a reminder in your diary a month ahead of time"? I get how crap Namecheap are - but presumably they send out reminder emails?
- sschueller 3y agoSame issue at enom for those domains. They have to be auto renewed by a date before the expiration date. Manual payment is not possible even before that date. If you miss it you can watch as the domain goes into redemption after the expiration date.
- Karellen 3y agoIt's always been a worry of mine that I might have an issue with renewing some of the domains I really rely on, and that sorting out the problem might take longer than the amount of time I have left before it expires. So one year, whenever a domain came up for renewal, I bought a two year renewal on it. And since then, I renew all my domains at the same time every year (first week of January, but you could do it any time) when there's between 1 and 2 years left on all of them. If there's ever a problem dealing with the renewal, I've got plenty of time to sort it out. Yes, the registrar gets to keep (on average) 18 months worth of registration fees on account, as it were, but for me it's worth the peace of mind.
- helsinkiandrew 3y agoThis. Waiting to renew a domain you rely on a few weeks or months before it expires is asking for trouble. Credit card issues, family tragedy, health problem will hit you eventually. Use a service that will renew automatically and/or schedule checks in your calendar.
- bun_terminator 3y agoFor me the last straw was them just banning all Russian customers. I kinda get it, but I can't support that. I just want companies to provide services or goods in exchange for money. Not everyone has to save the world
- _visgean 3y agoif you have no connection to France you cant expect to be able to use that domain. The same is true pretty much for all national domains. Also eu. https://eurid.eu/en/register-a-eu-domain/brexit-notice/ https://eurid.eu/en/register-a-eu-domain/brexit-notice/
- abcd_f 3y agoKinda hard providing service to X nationals while hiding in basement of your office building because X is attacking the very city you are in. Namecheap had exactly that. I'd say the ban was 100% justified.
- justsomehnguy 3y agoAh, yes, because those X barbarians live only in their X country and never ever leave it (except to attack the very city you are in). Also the whole thing starts to stink when the company based in Phoenix, Arizona suddenly have 1700 staff nowhere in the US. > I'd say the ban was 100% justified. Well, of course, because it never can happen for you, because you are a proud member of a democratic civilization which never partakes in the wars, never brings someone to heel, never ever can be brought to ICC. Right?
- bun_terminator 3y agoI don't see the connection between a country and its (civilian) nationals. But to each their own, I mostly just don't want my domains to be suspended because of things my government might do or say or whatever
- thesmok 3y agoThe nationals are the country and should take responsibility for their country's actions because it's effectively their actions.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- kloch 3y agoWhen clicking on the link from my office (which happens to be in a data center) I get this: > whoa there, pardner! Your request has been blocked due to a network policy. Try logging in or creating an account here to get back to browsing. If you're running a script or application, please register or sign in with your developer credentials here. Additionally make sure your User-Agent is not empty and is something unique and descriptive and try again. if you're supplying an alternate User-Agent string, try changing back to default as that can sometimes result in a block. These kinds of blanket bans on data center IP's ignore the fact that real humans do use them. As for user-agent, I'm using Firefox on OSX with no user-agent obsfucation plugins.
- asia92 3y agotry running a VPN at home and routing through that
- kloch 3y agoI'm trying to discourage others from breaking things with blanket IP bans.
- throwaway167 3y agoMy personal solution is to boycot companies that do this, and should they come up in conversation mention they arbitrarily block legitimate users from their services
- xav0989 3y agoMy office switched to a cloud-hosted network proxy appliance for our internet access. We now get "access blocked" from dozens of websites, including from reddit, simply because the "edge" ip address is technically from a netblock assigned to a data centre.
- akaike 3y agoNormal, it’s same in my company
- jonathantf2 3y ago
- quiet_cool 3y ago[dead]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- a13n 3y agoI mean, don't use NameCheap period. Use AWS Route 53, Cloudflare Registrar, etc. It might cost a few bucks more, but your cloud services provider isn't motivated to squeeze as much money out of you as possible during domain registration/renewal. Say goodbye to all the random upsells you don't need and say hello to straightforward domain/nameserver/DNS management. Cloud providers make their money from compute, storage, and network. They're motivated to make domain management a good experience so people move/start more projects there.
- jmbwell 3y agoDomains is such a racket. On the retail side, there are too many entrants fighting over <$10/yr scraps like street vendors hawking knockoff DVDs. On the upstream side, there is a king rat of mafioso companies formed out of Byzantine M&As that is completely unreachable and unaccountable to anyone. I know we all hated network solutions when it was the only game in town, but I’m not sure the current flea-market situation is a net improvement.
- sackfield 3y agoIs there any research out there that tracks how well companies are doing in customer service? I can't tell whether I'm getting old or whether the state of play has always been like this, but like the author I run into the following situation with alarming regularity: Customer: I want to do X. (Note: very reasonable request) Business: You can't do X. Customer: Why? Business: Reasons that I can't adequately disclose. Its getting to a point where the business (or government agency) feels like its spending more time preventing you from doing reasonable thing rather than helping you. The authors case here is a good example. But is this new or has it always been this way?
- water-data-dude 3y agoI think that any service filling that role is likely to get hit with a terminal case of enshittification. There’s been a few services in a similar niche (glassdoor is a standout example) that eventually changed to the “as long as you’re paying us for an expensive corporate account, we’ll remove negative reviews if you complain about them” business model. The incentives are arranged to make it pretty much the only viable way to make money.
- mrich 3y agoWorst experience for me was .us. I bought three, don't know if they mentioned it at checkout, but those can only be registered by US citizens, which I am not. I could buy them, but after a couple months I received an email from the registry regarding one domain telling me to prove I was an US citizen. I couldn't, Namecheap support told me they couldn't help either. So the domain was suspended. A few days later they suspended the other domains which they found since they belonged to the same contact. Partly my fault for not reading the registry rules I guess but definitely a bad experience.