I would strongly recommend against namecheap.

You can only tell how a registrar handles problems when they occur. I ran a large non-controversial content forum ranked high globally, but a user posted illegal image, namecheap.com suddenly sent me a link warning that they will suspend my domain completely within 24 hours, if I did not delete two problem images (which were inappropriate/troublesome images but in the context of the forum posts, "a very poor attempt at humor").

If I missed the warning email or checked my email after 24 hours they would have completely suspended my domain. I'm talking about a site with MILLIONS of visitors per month and ten thousands of posts per day, not some small blog. I thought the warning was SPAM then looked at the headers and then found it was really namecheap.

I do wonder how other registrars handle this. Who did you go with after that experience and how are you sure it wouldn't happen with them?

Context of the illegal image matters too. I'd be very pissed if it was a common shock image like goatse or a dead body, but more understanding if it was child porn. Basically would it be permissible on reddit?

I do use namecheap and don't check my email every month, so that is quite worrying.

What do you think would happen if MarkMonitor completely shut down Google.com, Microsoft.com, or Amazon.com because of a user submitted image hosted on one of their subdomains?

Obviously some images are more harmful and illegal than others, but Namecheap has absolutely no business acting as judge, jury, and executioner when it comes to something that in no way passes through any part of their infrastructure.

If they’re not hosting the DNS or web servers hosting the offending image then they should stand down. They took down Imgur for not deleting an image within I believe it was 2 hours of notice. Completely unprofessional.

I get the impression companies like Google, Facebook, and YouTube go through this all the time, and have a team ready to handle such moderation requests.

I'm not sure what legal rights or responsibilities the registrar has, though. Obviously someone is going through them because it works and it's probably easiest for them to just ignore a request if it's not their responsibility.

> Context of the illegal image matters too. I'd be very pissed if it was a common shock image like goatse or a dead body, but more understanding if it was child porn.

Why should content be a concern, or relevant, for a registrar?

If this was a CDN then I guess that this sort of meddling could be debatable, but DNS?

If I ran a business I would not allow customers that break the law. Would you?

Do internet service providers or apartment rentals or car rentals police your usage of their service?

So why would a glorified traffic signal be allowed to deny you service just because it disagrees with you?

I've been using happily Namecheap for quite some time (slowly migrated away from GoDaddy which is kind of horrible). However, this shared experience could be a big red flag for many people :|.

I'm wondering if someone else can relate?

Where did you end up moving to instead?

In the end I checked what 4chan used. In the past they used Gandi. Currently they use Cloudflare.

I went with Gandi as I suspect their support is more geared toward domain specialization. I don't like companies with no margins, and as Cloudflare domain sales officialy have no margin so they are definitely cheap in price, I find their non-paid non-enterprise support bad in quality. Gandi seems ok support and policy wise. Gandi also has paid telephone support if needed in emergency which is fine with me.

When transferring-out domains from Namecheap to Porkbun, I was horrified to learn that the email address used for domain registrations wasn't what I expected.

Somehow the registrant email address was set to their whois proxy address, which meant I could not receive my transfer-out EPP code.

I had to contact their support who reset it back to what I had set during purchase and I could receive the EPP code.

You know, I saw that about Cloudflare and made an account just now, but couldn't figure out how to use it as just a registrar without also signing up for their main DDOS-protection service (even if there is the $0 tier). I'm not really worried about DDOS attacks for my site and the idea of being forced to set it up rubs me the wrong way.

Am I missing something, or are these products really entangled like they seem to be?

To only use Cloudflare for DNS, just add a record and make sure the orange cloud icon is off to disable proxying. However, your observation is mostly correct. Cloudflare offers at cost domain registration as an extra benefit (or lock in) for their customers, rather than as a general service and as such, you can't change your nameservers away from them.

Got it, thanks. I don't (think I?) especially care which nameservers I use, I just didn't really want Cloudflare needlessly intercepting/interfering with my actual traffic

You can use Cloudflare for DNS only without proxying through their service, so you can even leave your domain at Hover.

Namecheap's DNSSEC implementation has broken a number of times and last I looked their API was pretty poor.