I would recommend a registrar that would explain to the customer why they would not want a .me domain for anything critical unless the person lives in Montenegro and trust the Government of Montenegro to maintain a good and trust worthy registry.

Otherwise just use which ever registrar is cheapest and who you think will handle any quirks or shenanigans that registries may do to domains you own, and which own system and processes hold high enough standard for you.

What’s with the shade on Montenegro? .me is a perfectly normal domain.

And the government doesn’t even operate the registrar, it’s operated by doMEn d.o.o. which is a Montenegro version of an LLC.

ccTLD hacks are both semantically incorrect and geopolitically unstable.

The .io TLD will likely be phased out in the future due to geopolitics, and all the companies who decided it was more important to signal how hacker jargon aware their startup was will have to go through the very difficult process of changing domains.

In order to log into IRS.gov to get a code to pay my USA taxes, I had to verify my USA ID via a private company called ID.me, whose domain name AND company name are now forever tied to the whims of the government of Montenegro.

FYI, 75,2% of doMEn d.o.o. is controlled by American companies (GoDaddy.com LLC 38.352%, Identity Digital Limited 36.848%)

I mean, the government of Montenegro is a reasonable European democracy on its, admittedly slow, way to join the EU and is a NATO member.

It’s not really any different than this website we are now on being at the whim of the US government.

It's very different. If the USA soon starts cancelling politically inconvenient domains, European ones will be safe. Just like Nazi propaganda domains would be censored in Europe, but are safe in the US.

Every domain has a country. It's as if every non-ccTLD was actually underneath .us. For legacy reasons .com .org etc were grandfathered in. gTLDs are also under .us for corrupt reasons.

Politically inconvenient domains are already routinely seized by the US and there are international agreements in place that allow cross-border takedowns.

Why do you think t.me got taken down? Montenegro doesn’t care about Telegram.

Maybe India gave them enough reasons to care.

The biggest difference is the role of ICANN and their willingness to regulate the management of a TLD. With ccTLD they have an official policy to be hands off and not dictate what a country will do with their top level domain. If the US government would start to mess with Verisign and how the registry handles domain, then ICANN is within their own policy to just move it somewhere else.

The government of Montenegro could, just like many other ccTLD, decide tomorrow that every registrant must be a citizen of Montenegro. Many countries do this today, and it is no big deal because it is the country of and ccTLD that dictate how their domains should be operated. They can raise prices by a factor of 100 if they wanted, decide on some form of ID for registration, or dictate that you must have a company located in the country. ICANN has no objection to any of that.

ICANN is a nonprofit in California. It doesn’t really have any power on its own. It only exists because everyone from browser developers to server operators to consumers agrees we need a central place to organize stuff.

If the US justice system issued a warrant telling Verisign to do X, what do you think the courts would do to ICANN if they tried to actively stop X from happening? At best, they would be politely asked to stop, at worst, they would get felony charges for obstruction.

Every non-cc TLD is controlled by the USA which is also geopolitically unstable.

porkbun are great

There is nothing Porkbun or any other registrar can do if Montenegro decides to suspend the domain, which seems to be what actually happened.

I also recommend porkbun

Is it better than cloudflare?

Never use the same company for your hosting or CDN and your domain, and avoid cloudflare in general.

That's because if they don't like your website being on your CDN, and they suspend your account, you'll lose your domain. If your domain is at Porkbun you can change it to point to a different IP address.

And avoid Cloudflare because they're centralising the internet.

Has this actually happened to anyone on Cloudflare Domains?

If they don’t give you access, you can escalate to the ICANN.

Depends on what you mean by better.

I chose Porkbun because it's a small company with good prices, a good vibe, and all the tools that I need. Cloudflare was never going to be on the table because I don't want to feed the beast that is already swallowing the entire internet.

i use it too,can only recommend, also funny website btw.

Porkbun's dns is powered by Cloudflare (they don't hide it on their dns management page), so afaic it's the same can of worms

squarespace is legit. GCP cloud domains are moved to them.

Never had any trouble with them, but also moving away from them is unnecessarily hard (the code sometimes takes a day to arrive) and they cover the entire interface with their paid hosting stuff which makes them a poor registrar. I ended up on them because of Google Domains selling off but got off them because very annoying to use.

hm, tbh for me Squarespace is the most professional and ad-free UI (compare to Godaddy, and others)

I'd honestly be careful with squarespace. They are owned by private equity, advertise on countless YouTube channels, and at the same time their core market is under a looming threat from the AI companies.

You need your domain registrar to be stable and predictable. Their profile is not that.

which one then?

Porkbun has been good to me and a lot of others.

I've never had a problem with Namecheap but I'm not sure they are really any better as I've never had a problem with GoDaddy either.

My understanding is that both GoDaddy and Namecheap used to do domain front running[0] at the time I was registering my first handful of commercial domains, so I've always avoided even using their search engines.

I wonder if the practice still exists.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_tasting#Domain_name_fro...

I don't believe Namecheap ever did that, unless that was in the distant past. Never had a problem with them.

My bank automatically blocks payments to Namecheap. When I had domains with them, I had to call and give prior approval for the exact amount I would be paying. My bank claimed it was because of a high number of fraudulent charges.

Weird. I've been a customer for 15 years and never had any such problem.

Namecheap got bought by private equity fairly recently, so i switched away from them. Wouldn’t recommend starting with them just in time for the enshittification to start.

Their prices had already been going up for a few years before that, which finally pushed me off them starting around August of last year. I'm about to swap my final few domains over this month before they renew.

Porkbun has been great so far. Easy to use, refreshingly minimal, and good prices.

Dynadot. One of the largest registrars, and very competitive pricing like Namecheap. They also have very good features.

I’ve been happy with Gandi.net for years now. They’re based in France.

FYI - Gandi was great, but they got bought by private equity a few years back and the price skyrocketed and service went downhill super fast after the buyout.

Oh. I haven’t had to renew in a few years. Any EU-based alternative you suggest for when my next renewal comes up?

If EU++ is ok, Infomaniak.

I'm quite comfortable with Netim

Cloudflare

porkbun

Stupid fucking name

You made an account just to complain that a company's name is a random noun?

AWS Route53 or Namecheap

Cloudflare

So far so good, for personal use; they have the lowest renewal prices for top level domains.

Just be aware they can arbitrarily take it away from you. If that's fine with you, go ahead.

.onion This is only thing left, really. (Yes, yes – I do understand it's a hidden service. :-))