What are good domain name registrars?
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What are good domain name registrars?
What are good and reliable domain name registrars that you can recommend?
Ideally, it should have some support for dynamic DNS, domain privacy, and have IPv6 as first class citizen in their web-UI.
Given the recent developments around Namecheap, I started thinking about having backup options in case my country gets on a banned list eventually.
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I use https://gandi.net Never had a problem.
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I stopped using Gandi after their unprofessional response to their data loss incident in 2020: https://imgur.com/s3R1VVc
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I’ve personally experienced GANDI becoming surreally rude and unhelpful when they’ve made a mistake.
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Yikes, that’s not a good look
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I love gandi, and use them for all my domains, but their lack of transfer lock for
.frfor individuals, while they support it for their enterprise customers is a shame for a French company. (Even OVH, from which I moved away 5 years ago supported transfer lock for.frfor all customers)
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Unrelated, but I think that one should be less concerned about registrars and more about TLDs operators.
For example in my case (I have personal domains with
.com,.fr,.organd.de):- Milka contre Kraft Foods: Kraft Foods (now Mondelez, owner of the “Milka” chocolate brand) sued Milka Budimir which was offered milka.fr as a Chrismas present by her children in 2001. The french court ordered her in 2005 to give milka.fr to Kraft Food.
- Seizure of Megaupload: The US government just seized Megaupload.com since they could not seize the servers in Hong Kong.
- technische Panne bei der DENIC eG: DENIC had a 1 hour outage which affected multiple millions of domains in 2010.
- Ethos Capital to Acquire Public Interest Registry from the Internet Society in 2019 .org was almost sold to Ethos Capital, a shell company, with little to no transparency. Thanks to the uproar of netizens, EFF, and other organizations, the move was blocked by ICANN.
- I could go on and on…
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I personally use Porkbun, the issue with it is it doesn’t have some domains services like Namecheap, Google Domains, and others have. If you use cloudflare for a lot of services you can transfer domains you bought elsewhere to them via their registrar product. Otherwise I just recommend finding one you’re comfortable with, and provides the TLDs that you need/want.
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Porkbun won me over when I selected “New Zealand” in the “Country” dropdown on their sign-up form :)
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Same issues with https://porkbun.com, using https://namecheap.com until more TLDs are available. Would also switch to https://gandi.net tho.
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I use https://joker.com/ but mainly because they have been extremely reliable and I don’t want the effort of moving.
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Over 20 years and I’ve been using them for about 16
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First you maybe don’t realize that domain name registration and DNS are not the same thing. I say this because your title talks about domain name registrars and your body text talks solely about DNS providers.
They are totally different things. A Domain Registration is an entry into a database that says “example.com” is being answered by these 2+ DNS servers.
DNS servers then handle the conversion from example.com to IP addresses.
Domain Registrars typically offer both things, but there is no need for them to, it just makes good business sense to do so.
All of that said, I support what @popey said, and like Gandi.net.
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Absolutely. I’ve used a good number of providers, and they’re by far the best in my experience.
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I’m intrigued. Totally anonymous providers are vanishingly rare. Even NearlyFreeSpeech.net doesn’t do anonymous.
This was curious though, from https://njal.la/blog/opening/
As long as you keep within the boundaries of reasonable law and you’re not a right-wing extremist, we’re for promoting your freedom of speech, your political weird thinking, your kinky forums and whatever. Even Trump is welcome.
🤔. If you need anonymous hosting and aren’t a right wing extremist I guess it’s a good pitch. I think I’ll stick with https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/about/faq#TheLongGame as my favorite principled though, where you can’t be anonymous but you can say whatever you want (as long as it’s legal).
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Though their pricing has been changing around, so I’m not sure it’s a good deal anymore. I’m grandfathered.
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I actually just moved away from them because of pricing – didn’t like that you had to pay a monthly/yearly fee in addition to the cost of the domains themselves. Otherwise they were solid though.
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Who did you move to?
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Cloudflare Registrar has zero markups and excellent DNS management.
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Surprised not to see nearlyfreespeech brought up yet! They’ve been around a while and I’ve found it to be no-nonsense and reliable. I don’t use them for hosting but I’ve used them for DNS registration, DNS hosting and used them to delegate to my own authoritative nameservers.
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I’ve used them for hosting and that was totally solid too. Great provider.
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Indeed, I use them as well for registration, it’s all very simple and just works.
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Same thing, moved all from hover and godaddy and never looked back. Also makes a lot of sense for me as I do a lot of stuff on aws, to manage dns in there as well. And R53 is a really cool service.
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I don’t think there are any angels in the domain registrar world. It’s an unneccessary layer of resellers making a lot of money by making API calls to the actual domain registers. That said, I would second Gandi as not being particularly exploitative and tangilbly supporting FOSS.
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Feel free to get accredited to the ICANN and to the registries of your choice then, but don’t underestimate the work done by registrars. From the top of my head:
- whois server
- contact validation and control (WDRP)
- sometimes full contact management (Verisign)
- lifecycle management
- fraud detection
- dispute management (UDRP)
- the APIs of the registries suck, there’s the EPP standard (XML over TCP) but the E means « extensible », and registries extend EPP a lot in non standard, sometimes undocumented ways
I work for a registrar, and it’s definitely not easy.
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I switched from Gandi to NameSilo when Gandi fucked up their site, then NameSilo fucked up theirs! At least the management UI hasn’t been ruined yet, and they are cheaper. The old domain search page is still accessible at https://www.namesilo.com/domain_results.php if you type your search into the bottom search bar instead of the top one.
I was originally wanted to use SDF but they didn’t respond when I emailed my transfer code :(
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I use EasyDNS. The key differentiator with them IMO is superlative customer service.
As an example, back when ipv6 was first starting to drop from residential ISPs I tried to set my hobby domain up with the appropriate v6 flavored records for mail and botched it pretty hard. Their customer service folks helped me not just get back up and running but also understand what I did wrong and how to fix it.
That’s worth the small incremental extra $$$ IMO, but obviously YMMV. Gandi is definitely cheaper.
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I’ve been using Hover for years and like it. They’re not the cheapest or most featureful, but the service works and isn’t stupid. Their DNS is good. One drawback is they don’t support dynamic DNS updates but there’s a bunch of third party scripts that seem to work fine, at least for light use.
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What recent developments happened with Namecheap?
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INWX GmbH has been awesome for me, for about 10 years. It’s the only registrar I’ve found that exposes their API interactions with the TLD registries on the back end, and they do so in nearly real time. On the support side, they have people capable of patient technical conversations and navigating subtle or tricky problems.
Most registrars think they’re in an easy rent-seeking business, and customers are nominally happy because the window dressing is nice and nothing ever goes wrong. But one day you have an urgent delegation change that’s not going through, or some weird glue record conflict, or an unauthorized transfer, and lo and behold you find yourself wishing that your registrar could behave like a competent fiduciary.
INWX is the first registrar that stopped me looking for another one.
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I use namecheap, and just today I had a super fast support response.
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I second the porkbun recommendation. Also hear good things about joker.
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What about infomaniak (since you’re based in CH) ?
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I use https://www.blacknight.com/ because I’m Irish, and like to support a “local” business. (Local in quotes because I don’t live in Ireland anymore :p) Quite happy with them so far.
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I left Dyn in 2013 and am using FreeDNS since then: https://freedns.afraid.org/
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I like https://glauca.digital/ , they offer DNS servers as well, I think you should be able to do dynamic DNS via their API, but haven’t tried myself.
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I used to use Gandi, but then they FUBARd themselves, so I found Uniregistry which was great… until GoDaddy bought them. To be fair, they didn’t destroy them yet, but it’s only a matter of time.
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I use OVH for domains since 2011 and not had any problems with them. Switching to them allowed me to save a few bucks too. Not sure about explicit dynamic DNS support, though.
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I use a nearlyfreespeech.net for many of my domains, and namecheap for most of the rest. What are the recent developments around namecheap?
(Nearlyfreespeech is great, but I expect that they have to abide by any exclusionary lists that namecheap does…)
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Namecheap has informed customers registered in Russia that they will have to transfer their domains from Namecheap within 1 week.
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