What domain registrar is worth using?
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What domain registrar is worth using?
Gandi, one of the best hosts in Europe, has been bought by a not particularly great company (known for price gouging and bad customer service). All my domains are registered with Gandi, so I’m looking to move somewhere else, and I know I’m not the only one, and I have very little appetite for GoDaddy or 101domain or other lumbering dinosaurs who are just as bad as Gandi is probably now going to become. Since Google results for this sort of thing are mostly spam these days, I thought I’d ask here – I hope it’s not considered off topic to ask.
The following are all nice-to-haves for me personally:
- EU based
- Good selection of TLDs
- Fair domain prices
- Generally designed for people who know what they’re doing
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Cloudflare registrar? Google domains
I’d probably prefer Google Domains over Cloudflare if they supported more TLDs
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I am saddened to hear that Gandi was bought – apparently by “Montefiore Investment”, of which it doesn’t seem I can find much on the Internet – especially since this holding group appears to invest all over the place (according to their own page, and not focus on a particular market… (I just hope they don’t go the LastPass way after their own acquisition…)
Regarding registrars, I’ll have to take a look at CloudFlare (since I already use them for the DNS), or perhaps NameCheap (one of my colleagues uses it)… But, as the OP said, I’ll definitively stay away from GoDaddy and the like…
Or perhaps I’ll try to find an EU-based registrar that focuses on security and privacy.
P.S.: I always asked myself why do we need to pay yearly for a particular domain registration? Why can’t we buy it once and be done with it. In the end it’s just a record in a database somewhere, which although is massive, I think it can easily be supported by the international community. If for nothing else, let’s just think at the amount of damages due to expired and rebought domains for malware or other such purposes…
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Apparently Montefoire has merged Gandi with Total Webhosting Solutions:
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(I’m not affiliated and I don’t own any stock of the following companies)
Historically in France, in the nerd/FLOSS community, the main competitor of Gandi has always been Bookmyname.com. They’re owned by Illiad (which is the group behind French ISP called “Free”, and Scaleway, they are also popular in the french nerd/FLOSS community.)
I’ve never used Bookmyname.com, but I use to have my domains with OVH before transferring them to Gandi. I transferred them because I didn’t want my domains to be lost in case any abuse was reported on my VPS at OVH.
In Germany, I’ve seen most people just use ionos.
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I’ve had some minor success with ‘nameISP’, which seems to be Sweden based: https://www.nameisp.com/sv
Prices are a little more than I normally like, but this is news about Gandi means I’ll probably migrate back to NameISP.
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- Namecheap - dreadful name and coproratey looks but has decent prices and is generally fair to use. I’ve been using them a while. Can’t recommend their non-domain services though. As for their location, afaik their offices are split between the us and eu.
- NearlyFreeSpeech.net - Looks and services are very 90s-ish so make of that what you will, but otherwise it’s a very fair and generally well-regarded company, even on hn. I can also recommend their non-domain services for sure, their domain and dns services are very affordable.
- Cloudflare domains - Cheap, backed by cloudflare so trustworthy. Afaik I haven’t come across any stories where they’ve hurt their domain customers yet. Although the domain associated dns services might incur a small fee beyond their free dns tier.
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I didn’t know that Gandi was bought, very sad news :(
If you are looking for a privacy focused domain registrar, check this list:
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I like Dynadot (US).
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