If you want privacy protection on your whois lookups, then Google would be cheaper than the other providers, as they sell it as an add-on.

I also trust Google to have speedy DNS servers, if you're leaving the defaults in place. GoDaddy's DNS can be quite slow.

Perhaps not a "mind-blowing" product, but one I'd consider using.

name.com has had that for years. Click a button and it configures all the MX records for you and a few CNAMES on top (so you can do stuff like mail.yourdomain.com and calendar.yourdomain.com).

Godaddy also sells this as an addon, actually, every domain seller does, I don't know what is so special about Google's offert.

I whish I could make a poll on this subject: Do you think you can trust a website if it is hidding its whois information ?

Would you trust a bank where all employees were wearing a mask ?

I'd encourage people to try it out with a domain and form your own views. As for me, I'm moving all of my domains over to Google (as they get close to renewal.)

As far as our dashboard, we're building a better user experience, so that's nothing to fret about. I bet you'd agree when it's live that the experience is far more stellar than anything you'd find anywhere else.

I also find it frustrating that the domain dashboard has no clear path to my host record settings, which is 90% of the use case for me. I always have to click four or five times to find it.

Otherwise I love the product and pricing, and I will probably continue to use Namecheap in the future.

The dashboard is, frankly, out of date compared to the UI experience people would expect from us in 2015. We're building that right now.

And we plan to support TOTP 2FA, so you don't necessarily have to rely on SMS at all.

But noted. Just wait -- we've got some pretty cool things in store for you.

As a sysadmin who deals with your website a lot, I actually like the current management UI.

Yes, it could use a few tweaks here and there, but overall I quite like it. I hate websites that update their user interface and hurt my ability to get things done.

I use another registrar for some of my .de domains, and their web interface is horrible. I have ongoing issues with their interface not saving changes to my zone because the button says the zone was saved when it wasn't.

tl;dr - The current interface doesn't look nice but it works damn well and I can find everything. Please don't ruin usability in the new version. I care more about functionality than looks.

1. a "power user" interface, stripped down, that allows for the fastest ways to do XYZ (key bindings, fast client-side validation, batch uploads, etc).

2. a "first timer" interface, with explanatory info, slower pace so people don't feel like they're getting overwhelmed or pushed in to something, etc.

I've yet to see any registrar do this. Many do offer APIs, which, for developer power users, might be sufficient. I'd suggest to this company that they perhaps keep the current version as a fallback to the existing power users that already know how to 'get things done' with it; maybe not forever, but for a while so they can learn the new interface on their own schedule at the very least.

It's a minor quip (and just one off the top of my head), granted, and otherwise I'm a happy customer, but am very tempted to migrate as well as my domains come up for renewal.

Any screenshots or other indications of where you might be going?

NameCheap is better than most, though. The only reason I don't keep a lot of domains with you is price. Your renewal fee's are significantly higher than budget registrars like Dynadot. And when you own a lot of domains, that extra 10% adds up fast.

Like others have said, it's mainly that the interface looks and feels like something circa 2001. I inevitably click into the wrong menu/interface/page for something I want to do, and it just feels inefficient whenever I want to get something done.

The old interface within the redesign is jarring and, as you know, that old interface is pretty ugly! I love how it will show me the first 10 in a listing and then offer paging rather than showing 100 or all by default. Will be happy to have that fixed.

Other than that, I have at times found the split between the old (customer) and new (sales) interfaces confusing. I'll often be clicking through SSL info in the sales interface when I'm trying to remember where to get my client SSL lists.

Apart from that, I've been happy with the pricing and when I've needed support via live chat it's been really polite and quick. I recommend Namecheap despite that interface issue.

So, if Google is so interested in seeing universal HTTPS, what sort of SSL cert carrot will they provide to their registered domains to go along with the Page Rank stick?

https://www.gandi.net/domain/whois/

Do you remember RegisterFly?

The interface is ... almost ok. It's cluttered because it's used for more than just domain registration (think it's cPanel, actually) but the registration part is ok.

Note that this means you are technically not the owner of the domain, and you may be limited in your ability to transfer it, sell it, or do other things with it. Permissions are limited to what the registrar allows instead of what ICANN allows, although in most cases they give you nearly full control. You'll just have to read their terms if you want to know what you can do with it.

This is a myth. ICANN has published requirements on how private registrations must operate; ownership of the domain always goes to the paying owner, not the registrar.

If your registrar's privacy service is so bad that emails don't get through, transfers should be the least of your worries. Because of the new ICANN verification rules, you're at risk of losing your domain if emails don't get through to you.

Depending on the registry, it's unavailable or at least against the rules for some tlds.

And yet other TLD registries are sensible enough to make privacy the default for private individuals. .EU isn't bad in this regard, and others like .SE even go so far as to hide your name (most only hide your postal, email, telephone)

Frankly I don't know why anyone who can avoid it would want to touch Verisign TLDs with a barge pole... they have the continued gall to keep putting their prices up despite more competition than ever, and fail to raise the bar on basics like whois protection. Even .UK domains can be had for $5/year with registry level whois protection for heavens sake.

For example https://who.is/whois/habinow.com is one of mine that is private

while https://who.is/whois/ycombinator.com is pubic and shows Nicholas Sivo as the admin and an address and phone number for y combinator

When you register a domain, it's a requirements that you list contact information publicly. Companies usually don't mind doing this but many people don't want to list their home address and phone number for the world to see. Private registration lists a proxy company's information as the contact for the domain and they forward the information to you.

(d) A vendor conducting business through the Internet or any other electronic means of communication shall do all of the following when the transaction involves a buyer located in this state:

(1) Before accepting any payment or processing any debit or credit charge or funds transfer, the vendor shall disclose to the buyer in writing or by electronic means of communication, such as e-mail or an on-screen notice, the vendor's return and refund policy, the legal name under which the business is conducted and, except as provided in paragraph (3), the complete street address from which the business is actually conducted.

    (2) If the disclosure of the vendor's legal name and address information required by this subdivision is made by on-screen notice, all of the following shall apply:
    (A) The disclosure of the legal name and address information shall appear on any of the following:
    (i) the first screen displayed when the vendor's electronic site is accessed,
    (ii) on the screen on which goods or services are first offered,
    (iii) on the screen on which a buyer may place the order for goods or services,
    (iv) on the screen on which the buyer may enter payment information, such as a credit card account number, or
    (v) for nonbrowser-based technologies, in a manner that gives the user a reasonable opportunity to review that information. The communication of that disclosure shall not be structured to be smaller or less legible than the text of the offer of the goods or services.
    (B) The disclosure of the legal name and address information shall be accompanied by an adjacent statement describing how the buyer may receive the information at the buyer's e-mail address. The vendor shall provide the disclosure information to the buyer at the buyer's e-mail address within five days of receiving the buyer's request.
    (C) Until the vendor complies with subdivision (a) in connection with all buyers of the vendor's goods or services, the vendor shall make available to a buyer and any person or entity who may enforce this section pursuant to Section 17535 on-screen access to the information required to be disclosed under this subdivision.

it's a classic google "me too" project. i always get the feeling a lot of google projects come up because someone somewhere is going to be in a high level meeting with execs, and one exec sees something interesting and asks "why aren't we doing this?" and then someone gets to chime in "we already are!" and then they check the box for DONE and never look back.

Let's Encrypt is going to be doing that later this year anyway.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/11/certificate-authority-...

https://letsencrypt.org/

They no longer have to send people across the street for this critical part of hosting and can also easily integrate it with their other services, such as gmail forwarding.

Edit: oh, and it's fast to update, especially if you use Google as DNS server as I do.

It doesn't have to be anything more than a "me to" product.

Noting that if you google "domains" they now come up as the 2nd organic link. Nice to be king, eh?

Edit: I own a registrar and we compete with them (if you want to call it that). Obviously I am just referring to the fact that they can instantly rank high with what amounts to a beta product hence the "king" comment. Of course they need to be more than "me to" but that ranking goes a long way in getting them business even if they do very little.

They come up as the 2nd for you. Google Search results are personalized. It's 6th in mine, behind Hostgator.

It seems to me that Google is just trying to throw their enormous weight into every space now and it sickens me. This is how we end up with mediocre goods and services... No thanks Google.

They are much, much more than a monopoly at this point.

Not to mention, with Namecheap, GoDaddy or really any other company, you can probably get ahold of tech support 24/7. Good luck getting that from Google... Not that I've tried yet, but my experience with them in the past has been that it's mission impossible to talk to a human being in charge of something there, unless you're trying to hangout with the devs on Google+ or something for smalltalk, which seems to always be available.

That's quite the Google way, they are not looking for the one-time immediate profit, but for customers that will somehow generate income in the long term. It seems it's not working bad for them.

Oh, and if you renew for several years at a time, the cost per year goes down too.

Disclosure: Namecheap employee

Coupons are just a way of creating psychological anxiety about missing a good deal, an archetypal 'dark pattern'. That sort of thing actively drives people like me away from your business. I know I'm not a mainstream consumer, but IMHO neither is the average domain registrant.

Bear in mind the products we're mostly represent cost a low $10. If we had more wiggle room on pricing, we'd offer low pricing all the time. It's just not feasible for a business like ours to do 24/7.

I mean, Google is charging more than you, and it's not like they couldn't win a price war if they were so inclined - they could probably sell domains for $1/year without significant damage to their bottom line. Maybe it's time to get out of the 'cheap' box.

Sadly, there isn't anything like this.

$12 is really expensive...

That doesn't make it non-weird. Obligatory Godwin, "meh, Hitler was no more horrible than Stalin or Pol Pot."

Edit: enjoyed your godwin ref though ;)