I want to get some domains for selfhosted stuff, but I’d like to use a registrar that I won’t regret doing business with later, both in terms of ethics and potential customer service stuff. Who do y’all like most?
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Cloudflare dns changes are lightning fast compared to network solutions.
Namecheap. Avoid Dynadot.
Just curious. Why should dynadot be avoid?
I can only speak from personal experience but for me they jacked up the price significantly after year one and then sent my domain straight to auction after I decided not to pay. I respect that there are reseller-focused providers out there but they aren’t for me.
On the other hand, I’ve had nothing but quality service from namecheap for the best part of a decade.
Namesilo is quite good - cheap & been using it for 5 years now (coming from namecheap)
Top answers from the last 39580202 times this was asked:
- Namecheap
- Porkbun
- Gandi
- Cloudflare
Gandi massively increased their prices 2 years ago.
I was with Namecheap for years, and they’re totally fine. I am now with Cloudflare because they’re a bit cheaper and their API is well supported in various tools, and they also seem fine.
I wouldn’t buy domains from Cloudflare from a risk mitigation perspective. At work I direct six figures of budget their way annually, but as a free-tier customer in my personal life I don’t trust them not to fuck up at some point and lock my account. If I register my domain elsewhere I can bring myself back online by moving the nameservers. If it’s registered at Cloudflare I’m fucked.
I have one of my domains on Cloudflare and was thinking of moving the rest of them there. What makes it harder to move name servers away from Cloudflare than other places?
You’ll be fine to move them to Cloudflare.
What the other user is describing would be an extremely rare scenario, and you should be able to change registrars in that case anyway.
There’s really not much of any practical benefits of that kind of excessive “risk mitigation”.
I don’t agree and it’s no extra work to do it the other way. And when one or the other goes fucky, you can recover immediately.
I get that you’re likely exaggerating by saying “it’s no extra work”, but managing another account is markedly extra work. It will also cost extra because Cloudflare does not add any markup for registration, which is why they are the cheapest registrar.
I think the convenience and reduction of cost greatly outweighs the highly unlikely situation where “something goes fucky”. If it does, then what? You can’t make DNS updates for a little while?
The most likely reason to get locked out is billing issues, or maybe you lost your login information or something like that, which is going to be the same risk regardless of who your registrar is. Otherwise you’d have to be involved in some sort of legal issue associated with your domain and that is a much deeper issue than can be solved by simply changing nameservers.
Years ago I had a registrar go tits up without warning, taking about 70-80 active domains for an MSP’s customers with it. I managed their email servers and DNS, which was with the registar, of course. It was a bloody nightmare to recover that situation. Because we couldn’t supply them a DNS change to prove our control of the DNS, hence ownership of the domain, we had to individually affadavit each domain. Took weeks.
I get you don’t think it’s important, but there’s plenty of sysadmins that do, with experience backing that up.
I use namesilo for everything but my .au domains.
Got acquired and rised price.
