What's a better one? I've been using Google Domains, I don't really have a reason to complain about them, but I've always wondered whether parking everything with a big corporation like that will have its drawbacks one day.

I got angered by the domains part of Google Workspace (technically it's not the same as the Google Domains team), as they "lost" my access to the root domain name that I was using for a Google Workspace account that I deleted later:

- there was no way to move the "root" domain name away from Google Workspace while the account was still in service,

- after deleting the account, any access was definitely lost (I spent a lot of time on the phone with them, but they provided no help),

- the lost domain name was never "released", it remained officially under my ownership until the very last day of its registration period, even though I had no way to act on it.

- when I called that out a bug, they firmly replied that no there was no bug...

So, the lesson is: never use a domain name important for your business as the root domain name of a Google Workspace account, unless you really are sure that you will never need to move it to another registrar nor to delete the account.

A clients domain that was purchased through Google Workspace was actually a white labelled Godaddy.

Yep, but GoDaddy Support refused to help as it was the responsibility of Google Workspace to manage it...

Moreover the domain did not belong to my GoDaddy account (which makes sense, as I created the GW account and acquired the root domain several years before I signed up to GoDaddy). So maybe it was a hidden GoDaddy account, something like a service account for the exclusive use of GW internal tools?

I switched to NameCheap a couple years ago. I don't have anything to complain about.

I, too, use namecheap. In fairness I’m not as sophisticated as at least 95% of people on hacker news but it has certainly met all of my needs for the half dozen sites and 2 dozen domains I own

namecheap is fine as long as you don't have a problem. but if you have a problem you can be absolutely sure that they will never fix it.

Not my experience at all. Every time I've opened a support ticket, the initial response has been fast and the problem has been resolved quickly (based on the 3 or 4 incidents I've had over around a decade with them).

Ive had the COO call me personally on a sunday before to iron stuff out. That's not true.

How many domains do you have with them/what's your monthly spend? I suspect this varies wildly.

I have purchased a hundred or so since I got with them almost 10 years ago, but keep about an average of 5-10 at any given time. Monthly spend is minimal, I pay for 2yr+ up front.

Can't speak for aliquot, mine is around a low hundreds of dollars per year across two accounts (personal and professional, not linked) and service has been exemplary.

I use hexonet. Can't complain. They do everything right.

The website's homepage is deceiving. The control panel they offer is really for power users. They expose literally everything, and have APIs for most things that you'd want to automate. For people who have to manage multiple domains, it's helpful.

Porkbun is really good. Cloudflare also sells domains at registry prices, very convenient if you already use their services.

Most of my projects heavily use AWS, so I just use Route53's registrar for them. I ain't keen on parking everything with a big corporation like Amazon, either, but at least their transfer process is pretty thoroughly documented so I could always migrate elsewhere.

My main personal domain is through freedns.afraid.org, which in turn uses registryrocket.com for the actual registrar. I'm sure there are better options as far as nameservers and registrars go, but (aside from me forgetting to renew every couple years) it's been rock solid and worth every penny of whatever pittance I ended up paying for a premium account a decade-ish ago.

And then I've got a random .is domain registered through 1984 Hosting. Still haven't figured out a use for it.

Note that Amazon themselves only register com and org directly: for most other TLDs they resell Gandi.net or other registars.

Most companies use some other company. The company I use, which is local to where I live because I want the local reliable support, uses Enom. I can't be bothered to get an Enom account so I pay them. Others use resellerclub etc. So instead of going with Godaddy or any of the big names, get a hosting provider with rock solid customer support and service. Either way, you'll probably end up with a domain from Enom but at least you'll have good service from a local provider.

Again, in case most people don't know this, most hosting providers are resellers of the big companies. They all do the same thing and have access to the same stuff. The only difference is that individual company's pricing and service. Pick wisely!

I miss dyn.com. They were my registrar for over a decade before Oracle bought then and made them suck. They were the one registrer where you felt like you were dealing with a professional company, not "Crazy Eddie's discount Domains". When Oracle closed them down, I moved to namecheap, which is pretty good overall.

I would love a Crazy Eddie’s Discount Domains website built using 90’s html where the domains are sold like timeshares. Do I even own this domain? Not clear, but at $0.90 cents a year who can complain. A counter for page visits and Eddie’s cocaine budget.

It's possible that whatever you bought the domain for will be existentially dependent on an urgent need to talk to a human at your registrar (such as in the case of transfer, fraud, hacking, or a mistake).

Never ever use any google product if you might need to talk to a human.

We use a combination of AWS and Gandi.

Hover. Been SO happy with them for a lot of domains for a long time.

i recommend porkbun. namesilo is good. and never use namecheap.

Moved all my domains to cloudflare. Never been happier.

joker.com

They're a pretty terrible registrar/host but their marketing is fantastically good. Every non-tech business owner I've met uses them. It makes me kind of sad.

I don't get disappointed at neophytes using GoDaddy. People who know better though should know better. Nobody on here should be using GoDaddy.

Like most things it's not as simple as that. I'm a long-in-the-tooth web guy (30+ years doing this stuff) and for Legacy Reasons I use GD. I wish I didn't, but all my domains (and all my client domains) are with them. Yes I could unpick, but do I have time / inclination? No. Do I want multiple domain registrars? No.

So - yeh, agree in principle, disagree in practice.

That's fine, you just have to admit you're supporting an incredibly slimy business. That's okay, many of us do/have done that even when we don't want to, but at least you gotta tell others to offset your GoDaddy use. Two people swayed away from using it by your opinion should just about do it!

I think most business are slimy if you dig deep.

I'm curious what the reasons are. I moved ~60 domains from Gandi to Namecheap and then back to Gandi over the span of 10 months. Namecheap was cheaper, but their support wasn't as good and their UI is a disaster (IMO).

Both times I had all domains moved over in less than 24 hours.

Can you say more about how this works? I find it intimidating. And I don't understand how the cost works -- if I'm in the middle of my term with the first registrar, do I get a refund when I move it over? Like when you moved from Gandi to Namecheap and back in 10 months, does that mean you paid 3x registration, or did you get proportional refunds when transferring?

this depends on the tld. for most tlds you buy another year of registration on transfer and thus extending the expiration.

for example for .de domains though, the remaining time on your registration is dropped and you start fresh from the transferal day.

For .pl the transfer is free, but it also does not extend expiration period (it stays the same).

I used to have about 50 domains there and moving everything to Cloudflare was pretty simple. Just start using it as a DNS first, which I was doing anyway.

Then the transfer process takes about 2 minutes per domain so the whole process was done in a little over an hour.

I thought Cloudflare had a deliberately manual (and therefore more secure but also more expensive and slower) process for registering domains. Has that changed?

I didn't have much issue with the process, it seemed like any other. A local business is a friend of mine, they were paying too much for too little from their previous web host/dev so I transferred the domain name to CF and ran their WordPress "business card" type site through a static site generator, placed all the files in GitHub, and pointed CF Pages at the repo. Whenever they want to make changes, they spin up the current state of WordPress in LocalWP, make the changes, I run it through the static site generator and push the files to GitHub. Takes them a few hours of messing around to get their content right and takes me 5-15 minutes to jamstack it to GitHub. Free hosting and cheap/simple DNS.

That sounds interesting. Which static site generator?

(Currently happy with the bitnami wordpress image, but wouldn't mind going 100% static!)

Not OP, but I just downloaded one such WordPress business card website with wget and put it into S3/CloudFront.

We offer a zero-markup registrar on self-service platform also - https://blog.cloudflare.com/registrar-for-everyone/

Ah, cool :)

Registering domains is very fast. To transfer a domain Cloudflare insists that you use them for DNS, but I already do that.

For the transfer it’s just like anywhere else. Initiate the transfer, get the code from the other registrar and wait for it to go through.

>> To transfer a domain Cloudflare insists that you use them for DNS

That feels… slimy…

I mean, 99% of the reason to have a domain with Cloudflare is their DNS/WAF/CDN and the options you get from having them at the edge. If CF isn’t handling your DNS they can’t provide those services without some very specific configurations that aren’t for the faint of heart.

You can use anybody as a registrar if you don’t want those tools though. CF sells domains at cost so it’s not something they aren’t making money on.

I had this problem. Then I learned that Hover has a concierge transfer-in service. You give them your registrar creds, they do the work of transferring everything seamlessly for you.

Sure, it’s Tucows, but it’s not GD.

I haven’t had a problem with them, I also know they have been around for awhile which is why I use godaddy.

I still remember how their jerk founder "saved" a village in Zimbabwe from a "problem elephant", and they have basically advertised their business using boobs for years. And that's besides all the scummy actions and questionable security practices of GoDaddy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Parsons#Controversies

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_controversies_involvin...

I wish that commenters on the Internet generally, and HN in particular, would lay off "murder and jaywalking" arguments.

If Gandi advertised with lewds, well. People would complain and they would probably stop.

The "scummy actions and questionable security practices" are both necessary and sufficient to persuade the informed reader not to patronize their services. Bringing in additional minor peccadillos weakens the argument by bringing out everyone who likes tits in ads.

No one likes the kind of bad behavior GoDaddy is known for.

This comment might seem a bit out-of-place if you don't happen to use showdead.

To me, using women to sell a product reeks of a bygone era and a certain mentality we’re working to get away from. I think that alone is a perfectly acceptable reason to think a company sucks and not use their product. Voting for behaviors with your dollars is important.

I wonder if it is more dehumanizing to the affected woman to show an attractive woman, or to not show women at all.

I think to be consistent with the 'don't use women for ads' approach, you need to be opposed to use human-based or non-product-related human interest advertisement at all, which includes, but is probably not limited to men [1], children [2], the elderly [3], people of a certain demographic and/or sexual orientation and/or gender identity [4], or national rivalries [5][6] or stereotypes [7] or even the concepts of such. You would also have to have a stern look at the art scene, because sex also sells as sculpture, on canvas, as a particularly suggestive voice or on the screen - it may be part of the work, but it also has an advertising effect.

And what a bleak world would that be.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7C-vYY3SBDE [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqgSO8_cRio [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qG4IaHgqH00 [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mw_gHMNs5iE [5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWvKVE6rLI0 [6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7g72KE8dmjc [7] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMQnPWjK5pE

While this is of course reductive, my counterexample is cosmetics and women's fashion generally, I'm happy to agree where internet services are concerned.

This.

So many companies run marketing campaigns that largely pay lip-service to whatever is trending lately, without actually changing their internal strategies to reflect this stance. I would much rather the companies put that money towards actions that might actually benefit the cause, rather than spending 99% of the budget trying to prove they're committed to solving $PROBLEM by donating the remaining 1% to some non-profit.

I totally recognize the counter-point; they didn't have to donate anything at all, and any amount is more than nothing. To me, the issue stems from the fact that companies are basically making money on the back of things that are actual issues. It's exploitation, plain and simple.

While I have mixed feelings about capitalism coopting lgbtq causes to make a quick buck, reducing lgbtq or pride to anal sex is some shameful bullshit.

"Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead."

a.k.a. please don't feed the trolls

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Anal sex defines lesbianism?

You might need to calm down, buddy. The gays aren't coming for you.

"Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead."

a.k.a. please don't feed the trolls

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

My apologies dang. I'll flag in the future.

Anal sex is what leftists base their political power around and yet try hard as shit to hide behind flags and "celebrations" because 97% of society is revolted by it. They will show a blurred murder footage on network tv any day of the week, but will never showed blurred gay anal sex. And, yes in a sense the gays are coming. Leftist scum came for our jobs, our paychecks, our homes. I for one applaud any advertiser who teams with beautiful prideful hetero women to display their bodies and celebrate beautiful hetero man-woman sex. At least they are not allied with hateful marxist political parties who have harmed millions.

We've banned this account. Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Thats right ban and censor you communist shithead.

"Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead."

a.k.a. please don't feed the trolls

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Almost everyone on this earth likes boobs - those who have them and those who don't - so I reckon they (like me) just hate that the company uses sex and other scummy tactics to sell a crappy service to unsuspecting people, instead of making their service better.

why?

I'm just curious (I do not see any bad event in wikipedia: am I missing something?)

> I do not see any bad event in wikipedia

There is a "Controversies" section of their Wikipedia article with 8 distinct sub-headings, and the section is prefixed with "For a more comprehensive list, see List of controversies involving GoDaddy" linking to another dedicated 15-section article.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GoDaddy#Controversies

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_controversies_involvin...

thanks, I did missed that

(must say I do not see anything I consider that bad, imho)

That's because they maintain their corporate identity vigorous and do their best to wipe anything bad.

Really bad security. They still enable broken ciphers like RC4 via ssh on their shared-hosting web servers. BTW - these servers use CPanel, which runs on CentOS 6 (or a derivative), which is EOL. If your company uses any security scanner, it will flag a lot on GoDaddy.

All the cool kids on HN hate GoDaddy. When prompted to elaborate the usual answer is "cuz they suck" or "I don't like their CEO". I first used GoDaddy about a decade ago, and thought nothing of it. I guess some people just like to hate. (or is it cancel nowadays?)

Educate yourself: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_controversies_involv...

Ah, I missed that, thanks.

anyhow, imho, I do not see anything that I consider that bad; they are sure selling products that anybody involved in IT may consider at "low level", so avoiding it. I have the same reaction anytime I hear the term "Wordpress", but no doubt is used by so many.