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.