This is why I only use service A for domains. And service B for emails.

I use service A for domains, service B for DNS and service C for emails.

How do you prove to service B that you own the domain?

You don’t need to. Your registrar tells the registry which nameservers you’ve chosen. You specify the nameservers that belong to your DNS provider, which causes DNS clients to query that DNS provider.

There’s nothing stopping you from paying for service with a DNS provider for a domain you don’t own, but nobody will actually query those nameservers for your domain, so it doesn’t matter.

You usually need to update the name servers with service A to point to service B.

I reached that by accident. Service B for DNS was just a more pleasant product to use than service A, and service A didn't offer certain features I needed for emails.

To bring it back on topic, this made it easy when I switched service A from Gandi to something else a year or two ago because a few things I was seeing from them "smelled funny." I don't remember the details, just that I wanted to switch.

Same, swapped over to PorkBun. Much more pleasant experience.

DNSControl[1] or another similar tool also helps a lot when moving. My DNS records are configured by a small JavaScript file in a git repository, and I can very easily point it at another DNS provider.

[1]: https://dnscontrol.org/

Could you disclose what B is? Pretty much please?

DNS Made Easy - perhaps too costly now, and not the best, but I use them since 10 years and had no issue with them. But might be oversized, I've started to use them for a startup b/c they had failover to point to another load balancer if one balancer/data center is down.

I've been using ZoneEdit for years, and they have a limited free tier. It's been great for my admittedly tiny use cases.

Which services do you use specifically?

Namecheap (I want to get off) and DNS Made Easy (I've started to use them with our startup for reliability)

Huh, I've been happy with Namecheap for a few years now. But I never looked that hard.

Suggestions for service B? Every single service I can find always seems such a pain to go in and add a subdomain and change something.

If you just care about user interface, Cloudflare is pretty stellar.

Honestly I think it depends where you are deploying to. I was previously using Netlify DNS for instance since most of my domains had static websites hosted on Netlify, this meant that they could manage quite a lot of records for me, I was also a fan of having CNAME-flattening which isn't available at domains.google (for reference I'm using the .dev TLD which is owned by the Google Registrar), but I've recently switched to using Google's name servers and even though I have to use a hard coded IP for the Netlify load balancer and I lost CNAME flattening I'm pretty the DNS requests are going MUCH faster (as in a few tens of milliseconds faster LOL). The reason I'm using Google's name server is because Netlify DNS doesn't support DNSSEC which for me is simply absurd in 2023.

Anyways, if you don't have a specific reason to pick any specific nameserver go with the easiest one or if you want to have the most features and portability go with Cloudflare.

Almost none of the most popular/important zones on the Internet aren't signed, so there is little impetus for providers to support DNSSEC. IPv6 is a more annoying lapse.

Digitalocean.

Same.. API access is pretty nice too... I run a simple script for dyndns at home.

I've been relatively happy using digital ocean for DNS.

Even run a dyndns script to have a subdomain for my wireguard connections to home.

I use service A for domains, service B for DNS, service C for emails, and service D for WHOIS privacy protections.

I have this, but it's not quite as fully seperated out, as server B is also my server host.

Always separate vendors for separate services.

Choices of convenience will always be waiting in the future.

Choosing a path that is not the most convenient (just slightly less) can go a long way.

Additionally, DevOps is actually scarier than self-hosting, or self-managing the hosting yourself.

Wherever you register a domain, make sure you practice transferring a domain in, and then out well in advance of ever needing it.

This is why I live in a society that enforces contracts through a court system.

In a functioning society you can’t sell someone a year worth of prepaid car washes and then decide they need to start paying you again 3 months into your contract.

Will be interesting to see if this touches the courts and, if so, how it plays out.

Contracts are only as good as the wealth, power, and ability you have to fight in court and ensure they get enforced. Which is why they 1. usually have lopsided boilerplate terms that protect only the powerful party, 2. are usually largely written by the wealthy, powerful corporation, and 3. usually only enforced against the relatively powerless consumer.

In the ideal fantasy world, contracts are supposed to be "meeting of the minds" between parties of equal power and benefitting parties equally. But when I think of "contract" today, I immediately think "weapon used by a company to beat up a consumer".

Seeing how Nintendo and the courts screwed around with the stick drift class action lawsuit (the parents can’t be in the class since their kids use it, yet the parents were the ones bound by the forced arbitration), and how clickwrap EULAs have become largely accepted as fully binding in courts…

100% this

Depending on how many domains he's registered and how much the value of that service for the remaining years is, this may be eligible for small claims.

> when I think of "contract" today, I immediately think "weapon used by a company to beat up a consumer"

This view is unsupported by the facts in all competent jurisdictions. It’s a convenient one, however, for certain people to spread.

One of the first things you learn about in contract law after the elements of contract formation is the idea of unconscionability, but it's often construed by courts in such narrow terms that consumers who are pressured or tricked into handing over their money have little recourse.

https://californialawreview.org/print/unconscionability-as-a...

"We can change these terms at any time, and your agreement is indicated by your continuing to exist. Also if we violate these terms you can't actually take us to court but we'll pay our buddy Arby to decide if you have a valid point"

From a non-professional prospective, one of the problems with unconscionability is that even terms that are blatantly opposite to prevailing law are highly misleading. This further disenfranchises individuals from the legal system, obscuring our rights even further. I'd personally like to see blatant examples of such start getting policed as something akin to giving improper legal advice.

Not a lawyer, but Gandi is based in France, and I don’t think they recognize mandatory arbitration (or choice of law) clauses in consumer contracts there.

Yeah, I was making a general point. I used to use Gandi some time ago. I forget why I drifted away from them. I think I only had one domain there, which I then let lapse rather than renewing. Given what I remember of their rep I'm surprised about this news, but I guess that's the constant churn of "creative" destruction. Enjoy the reasonable vendors you've figured out this year, because next year your own reliance will be an asset to be sold and arbitraged away.

In California at least, a small claim is pretty efficient as long as the claim is more than the modest filing fee. They can't hire an outside lawyer to handle it, either. If they have an inside one they can use that, but anyway.

I've had great success this way against United Airlines, Toyota, and other bigs.

Here in Indiana, in many jurisdictions companies have to hire outside counsel to go to small claims. This means that it can be quite expensive to litigate for businesses against legitimate small claims.

Here in California we have several levels. There are different classes of small claims, there are limited civil claims and then unlimited civil for over $25,000 though some counties have special programs for unlimited claims under $50,000. If you stay in small claims, usually you get an in-house paralegal that just wants it to go away. Over $50,000 you get outside counsel that wants to bill the file.

The sweet spot for companies is the low tens of thousands. At that level, you're disqualified from small claims and it's not really worth an actual lawsuit. It's a very narrow band, though.

OP: Have you enforced a contract through a court system? Would love to hear more about that.

I haven't seen anything from them yet - do they say anything about forwarding addresses?

Neither do I.

Would be really upset if they start charging for the two included mailboxes.

Has anyone felt that GoDaddy is doing the same thing? They just switched to Microsoft for domain hosting and email, and it's a mess, and it seems as if all of the free mailboxes are gone including, free forwarding.

Yes, they dumped their basic free email for a 30 day trial of Office365 and an offer to pay monthly for Office365 through them. That's why I moved from GoDaddy to Gandi, so that's annoying.

Thanks for confirmation. I've been fighting the settings for a few days, in multiple domains. It's not clear. Does look like all free emails are revoked. Too bad.

How do european customer protection laws not protect against this??

uk is not in the eu anymore?

Gandi SAS (Société par Actions Simplifiée) is a French company, not British.

EU law didn't evaporate the moment the UK left

it was almost entirely transposed into UK law

> I've purchased domains from Gandi, pre-paying for multiple years of service such that some domains I have don't need renewing until 2027.

Just in case you did not know: if you transfer to a different registrar, you will not lose the extra years of registration. You can confirm the expected expiration date of 2027 at lookup.icann.org.

> if you transfer to a different registrar, you will not lose the extra years of registration

I did not know that. But how do you do it? And where to find a list of reputable registrars (which seems the rarest of species)?

As a long time customer, I would recommend Namecheap. I was trying out Gandi since a couple months. On the bright side, they have a lot of additional international TLDs, but that's about it. Gandi has been noticeably more expensive when comparing equivalent domains.

Strong disagree. Migrated off namecheap after their support left a bad taste in my mouth. Also they had a data breach and did NOT notify me as a customer of theirs.

https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/116j7iq/fyi_namech...

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/namecheaps-em...

That article seems to indicate that no customer data was involved... looks like their send-only email key was compromised.

Maybe I'm not paranoid enough, but I think there would be too much noise if every company blasted out emails to all customers any time there was ANY security failure, including failures that do not expose customer data... Sure, they should follow up on your who got phishing emails, but I don't see a need to email every customer.

I've had no issues with NameCheap, but I just register domains, no other fancy services.

Okay, but where did you take your business? That's what we wanna know :)

Google Domains has yet to cause me angst

Until your entire google account is suspended.

Associating domains with a Google account that is subject to arbitrary automated banning seems like a bad idea to me. It would be fine until it's suddenly not.

I hope you didn’t register a critical and/or revenue driving domain with them, as others pointed out you are taking a larger risk than you may think.

As an ex-customer, I'd avoid namecheap. They are expensive and have given me no end of trouble.

I currently use porkbun and namesilo with very few issues so far (about 3 years). You will need to unlock your domain and get an authorization code (EPP Key) from Gandi and then go to your new registrar and select Transfer Domain. Its fairly straight forward.

You might need to elaborate on what problems you experienced with Namecheap before promoting two relatively unknown registrars. Although, my only experience with Namecheap was for SSL certs back in the day.

What happened that drove you away?

Recently moved to Porkbun. Can confirm positive impressions so far. Reasonable pricing. Straight forward webforms. 2 factor. No trying to slip extra bullshit in.

For me the purpose of a registrar is to register a domain. Porkbun might have other capabilities, but for this purpose it was wonderfully singleminded for me.

Could you share what troubles you had with namecheap, in vague terms at least if you don't want to be specific?

+1 on the issues with NameCheap.

1. They routinely fail to auto renew domains despite correct billing details and auto renew being on (I lost some domains to this).

2. They support premium domains, so you can be struck by lightning and randomly have the price of your domains dramatically jacked up (had to drop a domain due to this).

3. The name (NameCheap) no longer checks out, they are not cheap anymore.

They stopped being good about 2 years ago.

> 2. They support premium domains, so you can be struck by lightning and randomly have the price of your domains dramatically jacked up (had to drop a domain due to this).

Do you have an example of this as it is against ICANN's rules IIRC.

The only instances I have seen about this were the posts here on HN when someone didn't read the registration price being at a discount compared to the renewal price thereafter.

If there is of course a legitimate instance of reclassification into a premium domain after the fact, you have a big case on your hands.

Maybe a premium domani the whole time, but with an "introductory offer" so it's not clear at the time?

I did not take screenshots at the time so I can not prove it.

But I remember that I specifically spent effort/time to pick a name that was not marked as premium and double/triple checked before registering. Then about 3 months after I had registered it, it all of a sudden showed as premium in my account.

From my perspective it doesn't really matter much if they made it premium after I had registered it or if it was always premium and they hid that fact and gave me an invisible discount. The end result is the same.

I use NameSilo but am 50/50 on it. Their control panel does not send a "Content-Type" header, which is effectively mandatory, and the support team flat out could not understand what I was talking to them when I was trying to point it out to them. It "worked" in Chrome and Firefox without add-ons and that's as far as their concern ended.

> But how do you do it?

Any registrar that receives the transfer will automatically have the extended expiration date. (The expiration date is actually tracked at the registry.)

For reputable registrars, I think you could gather a list from HN comments and then "do your own research" to whittle down the list.

I moved from Gandi to Google Domains, then later to Cloudflare Domains.

CF has the most serious product out of any of them, and they sell domains at-cost as a loss-leader to get you in.

It depends on the registry, but you cannot extend a domain out past 10 years.

Cloudflare domains are sold at cost, and CF is a very rock solid platform (for DNS/registrars at least)

Were the mailboxes part of the contract, or were they a "here's a nice thing we're giving you for free" deal sweetener?