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Namecheap Disrupting Itself with Spaceship
- bevekspldnw 3y agoI feel like this is the sort of thing Alphabet was supposed to do, but instead Google’s ad machine steamrolled any actually new ideas and even now, after having OpenAI start to take a bite of their lunch, Google’s ad business is calling all the shots on what is/isn’t allowed to be built. If Google had the guts to put a bunch of teams in a new company under alphabet with the explicit goal to disrupt Google Search via any means necessary they’d be in a much better positions today. Real respect to Namecheap, this takes guts to commit too.
- moelove 3y ago+1 Moving forward with historical debt is very difficult and risky. However, at the same time, it also requires managers to have a clear understanding.
- joshstrange 3y agoI'm honestly tempted by the shared hosting because of the price alone. No, I wouldn't host anything too serious there but that's way cheaper than I've seen from someone like DreamHost (where I have an old account that's not worth migrating super old sites from 10+ years ago off). I'd like to move my blog off wordpress.com and have a semi-managed WP instance instead (so I don't have to pay Wordpress and arm and a leg for plugins). I don't want to manage a VPS, I do enough of that for my day and side job and I did that for many years for my blog and hated it.
- j45 3y agoPlacing Cloudflare in front of most shared hosting is often enough.
- mvdtnz 3y agoThere is absolutely no context here. What is levelsio? Thanks for asking what? What is spaceship?
- jsheard 3y agoFrom what I gather Spaceship is a new company which provides similar services to Namecheap, but is actually owned by Namecheap, ostensibly to get a fresh start without the organizational cruft and tech debt they've accrued. Why they made it a new brand rather than "Namecheap 2.0" I have no idea.
- danlindley 3y agoI believe that is answered in the link: "Someone else mentioned the issues and limitations with our current brand and we want to try and move beyond that and I think we're on the right track"
- duskwuff 3y ago> "Someone else mentioned the issues and limitations with our current brand..." This really just sounds like a veiled way of saying "our current brand has acquired a bad reputation and this is a way to get away from it".
- preinheimer 3y agoI don’t know that you’re being fair. Their name is “namecheap”. It’s hard to lean in on anything premium when “cheap” is in your name.
- TylerE 3y agoNamecheap a terrible name that sounds like a scam company.
- jsheard 3y agoIt's worked out well enough for them given they've become the 2nd largest registrar, but yeah I suppose it won't hurt to play both sides by having a more premium sounding secondary brand.
- eatonphil 3y ago> Namecheap has always been a 100% privately owned boot strapped company. Growth is good with 330 million in revenue last year and 15% yoy growth. They're doing pretty well. Reminds me of Linode.
- candiddevmike 3y agoWonder how much of that growth is Google Domains refugees.
- abound 3y agoNamecheap got at least one domain from me as a Google Domains refugee. Most went to Porkbun, but there were a few domains with comparatively esoteric TLDs that only Namecheap supported.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- evbogue 3y agoLongtime Namecheap customer here. This is a really good idea, even if they're only doing a redesign. I recall the last Namecheap redesign was a little bumpy, because their interface went from web 1.0 to web 2.0 overnight, and I felt a little disoriented which is not fun when you're trying to update your DNS records.
- paxys 3y agoNot sure how this qualifies as "disrupting itself". Namecheap sells domain names. Spaceship (as far as I can tell) is domains + hosting + email. So it's not like they are taking anything away from their core offering, just providing add-on services, all with a shiny new UI. Funny enough Namecheap itself already offers all of those things, so this is basically a rebrand (probably to sound more premium and enterprise-y than "Namecheap").
- unsupp0rted 3y agoBased on arbitrary virtue signaling by the Namecheap CEO, is Spaceship gonna give customers one-week notice that their accounts are being dropped for committing the crime of being born in the wrong country, like he did at Namecheap? > If we were virtue signaling we wouldn't willingly be giving up a not non significant part of our business. This hurts us financially but it's the right thing to do, at least for us. Your leader/country is already killing innocent civilians/ukranians. They are putting it all on the line with their lives. They didn't ask for this yet they are dying for it. Change needs to come and the only way it can is for the Russian population to put it on the line as well. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30505789 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30505789
- aftbit 3y agoYeah this decision really rubbed me the wrong way when it happened. Like many of the western sanctions, it disproportionately affected ordinary Russians over oligarchs. Even worse, it probably disproportionately affected what little scraps of free press remained in Russia. I understand Namecheap's logic, especially from the early days of the war, but it left a sour taste in my mouth about relying on them for business.
- lostmsu 3y agoOrdinary Russians willingly pay taxes that fund that war.
- unsupp0rted 3y agoEspecially the ones who ran away from Russia in 2022 to avoid anything to do with this
- lostmsu 3y agoI don't think they banned users based on citizenship. Maybe by accident, or some people forgot to update their addresses and perhaps payment methods.
- noodlesUK 3y agoAs a namecheap customer I completely support the greenfield approach to what it means to be a registrar. However, what I want from a registrar is to be the best registrar. I don’t want hosting, email, or other services, I want a great DNS interface with an API that I can scope permissions on, and cheap and predictable name registration. That is it.
- jtriangle 3y agoI don't think it has to be an either/or thing, solong as a registrar isn't employing all sorts of dark patterns and ruining UX for the sake of upsell opportunities.
- bharrison 3y agoI'm with you, including NC customership and excluding a want of registrars to provide even DNS, let alone mail and hosting. That said, GoDaddy makes about half of it's annual revenue from it's 'core' business (domain name sales) over again in 'apps and commerce' (stuff you and I don't, but clearly many other less enlightened people want). The 'A&C' segment grew 13% in 2023 as opposed to 2% of core business.
- layer8 3y agoIt's also better to decouple one's email and hosting from the domain registrar, in terms of risk clustering.
- 14u2c 3y agoWhy not use something like Cloudflare for DNS? You'll never have to deal with the registrar again after setting name servers.
- rpgwaiter 3y agoCF has such a limited TLD selection. I know it's growing all the time, but sites like namecheap seemingly support every TLD as soon as it comes out.
- xnx 3y agoIt took me a lot of scrolling to figure out what services were actually being offered. Sounds like pretty standard cpanel hosting. Glad to see this service from a reputable and well liked provider. Is this a disruptive idea in 2024?
- pcdoodle 3y agoIn the process of switching over to porkbun. Never had a problem with namecheap, I just prefer my providers to keep the web 100% open and free.
- AlienRobot 3y agoSpaceship dot com? I'm no marketer but this sounds a bit generic for a brand name, specially compared to Namecheap. I wonder if names like this perform better than more unique descriptive names, or it doesn't matter either way. >we wanted to start building our next phase without any legacy limitations and a legacy codebase I wonder if this means Namecheap will disappear in the future, getting completely replaced by this brand new Spaceship.
- preinheimer 3y agoI mean stripe seems to be doing fine with an even more generic name.
- j45 3y agoWill Spaceship will do some of the same things as Namecheap in time where they sell for one price, and don't tell you upfront that year 2 will be more, or it's changed before the next registration and you get a pleasant surprise?
- quickslowdown 3y agoThey do tell you up front... They show you the price for the first year, then a dimmer price for year 2 on. I really don't understand where your confusion is, are you buying from their website or the app? Maybe the app doesn't show that?
- j45 3y agoSpaceship shows the price, namecheap hasn't when I've purchased clarified that it's a first year only price.
- quickslowdown 3y agoI personally think that's a reading comprehension issue on your part, but maybe submit feedback with specifics about what's confusing to you/what you'd like to see instead?
- j45 3y agoYour jab at reading comprehension seems misplaced. https://imgur.com/a/07GLcb9 https://imgur.com/a/07GLcb9 If you run a search for a domain such as readingcomprehension.com: Namecheap does show renewal prices; they also interchange it in the readingcomprehension.io with a "Retails at" price, which does not mean renew. Those are the prices that can change. It's an easy miss.. before diagnosing a 'comprehension' critique and feeling entitled to the labour of others to convince you otherwise - double-checking the page (below the fold) might save you from the irony. Clarity matters, both in web design and in critiques. I was hoping you might go do a search and read below the fold.
- handsclean 3y agoI used and was impressed by Namecheap EasyWP, which seems to be part of what they’ve folded into Spaceship. They really delivered on high performance, serverless, cheap WordPress. Moreover, they proved that Namecheap doing greenfield produces starkly better results than what I’d come to expect from their main website and last-gen hosting. However, EasyWP also ultimately lost me because they just never implemented DMARC/DKIM/SPF or automatic backups. I’m on board with necessary cuts to legacy and ecosystem compat, but missing these features isn’t that, it’s just an incomplete website – and solving it with plugins and manually synced external services significantly detracts from the value prop. And I’m not seeing either feature explicitly advertised on spaceship.com.
- handsclean 3y agoAfter a quick chat with support, Spaceship also supports neither DMARC/DKIM/SPF on website-sent emails, nor automatic backups. They recommended using a third party plugin to connect the web hosting part to the personal email hosting part, but even then you just get SPF and DKIM, not DMARC.
- mieses 3y agoSpaceship does not plan to implement Dynamic DNS or an API, some of the best features of Namecheap.
- nikolay 3y agoNamecheap is the worst domain registrar! And it's expensive as well - regardless of its name!