Used gandi for forever, then they had a major hardware issue and lost customer's data and kinda was rude about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22001822 - so I decided to move my business elsewhere.

Where is 'elsewhere'?

I'd heard great things about Gandi from colleagues, and used them for years, but at USD$16.59 per year per .com domain they're relatively expensive for larger numbers of domains. Namecheap has been my go-to more recently, and I haven't had any issues with them.

I actually find the prices somewhat reassuring. They're not trying to make their margins through dark patterns and upsells, they just ask for it up front.

I can see how it'd start adding up with too many domains, but at my level the trust is more comfortable.

True. Prices are higher than of competitors. In my case, since I don't have many domains, paying between $10 and $20 per domain per year doesn't make much of a difference.

Honestly, I switched from Gandi to Cloudflare the second I could, Gandi has been okay but pretty expensive where it didn't seem necessary especially for just a domain and nothing more. I have had no issues with Cloudflare as my registrar.

I've only recently been using Cloudflare and noticed they do registrar and DNS hosting, I might transfer to them later if it's worth the hassle. I'm currently using namecheap.

https://www.cloudflare.com/products/registrar/

I tried to buy a domain through Gandi, and my bank cancelled the card I used because they thought it was a fraudulent purchase.

I don't know if they get a lot of chargebacks against them, or if it was just a fluke, but I haven't tried again since.

Are you from outside France? I had a charge to them blocked years ago but haven't had any trouble since. I suspect an out-of country charge raises red flags in bank fraud departments.

I can always find something to complain about (tiring change of user credentials a few years back). But Gandi are on a completely different level from their competition; philosophy, technology, and support are all the best. - Happy customer for over a decade.

I find all the gandi recommendations interesting. Issues with Gandi canceling my friend's registration with no warning pushed me to choose namecheap. Which has been problematic for some people as well, from the sound of it.

Same with namecheap.com (Ukrainian company)

They're American with some offices in Ukraine for support, etc..

"Some offices" understates it a bit, just under half their workforce is in Ukraine according to their careers pages.

EDIT: I misread it, it's most of their workforce.

Wow, 1700 teammates in Ukraine vs 40 in the US (according to their site). Didn't know it was such a stark difference.

How is that you even need 1700 people to run a domain registrar?

Oh, I misread the page! I thought it was 2000 in the US, but that's the year their offices were established. That means the large majority of their workforce is Ukrainian.

Terrible service, terrible support. Happy it worked for you, but advice is to stay away as far as possible.

If it's ukrainian company it doesn't mean their service is any good

They are based in Phoenix, Arizona, but yes, we've also been using them for years for production stuff and never had issues.

Thanks, will move my only domain from there.

If you're Russian...they may have already done it for you.

Could be risky with current events; what if Russia seized the company?

I mean you can never predict these things fully, so be ready to move domain registrars or even domain names if you ever need to. Another example, UK residents or businesses that had a .eu domain name were no longer allowed to have it post-brexit.

Namecheap has a large Ukrainian workforce but is incorporated in the US and also has employees in many other locations around the world. The company cannot be seized by Russia, and I trust them to take appropriate measures to lock out their Ukrainian offices if the cities fall. In the meantime, I'll stick with Namecheap precisely because they employ a lot of Ukrainians.

Agreed. I've been using Gandi as my domain registrar of choice for years now. No complaints.

10+ years at gandi. Never any problem. Super tech savvy support. Can only recommend.

I switched to Dynadot years ago since they hosted wikileaks. If figured if they could handle that domain they could take care of anything of mine. Nice interface, never any issues.

Google domains is great. I hate to feed the monopoly but they do everything right. Auto-renews every year, lots of reminders.

I considered them a while ago, but Google has become a bit infamous for terrible/nonexistent customer service (even for paid customers), as well as random indiscriminate suspensions. Not a great combo. Don't wanna try my luck.

(But then again, I ended up getting a .dev domain at a different registrar, so I guess I'm screwed either way)

I would not use Google for anything that I wouldn't be OK with getting cut of without notice and recourse considering how infamous their customer support (or lack thereof) is.

> Auto-renews every year, lots of reminders.

That's pretty standard with any half-decent registrar.

I've been using Gandi for ~7-10 years with nothing but positive experiences as well

Familly domain name is at Gandi since 1999, no issue so far.

Gandi was founded in 2000?

1999 according to wikipedia. And I did not came up with this year, it's what is written on the domain name.