I'd really appreciate some recommendations for a good domain registrar. A few years ago I bought two domain names on Epik.com. I only chose them because a friend of mine had been using their services for a few years without issue, and had a referral code. Recently I've been really unimpressed with their lax security, poor management, and shady business practices. I'd like to move my domains to a new registrar, but I'm not sure who to choose. Any recommendations would be really appreciated!
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The only issue I have is that they moved their DNS offering to Cloudfare instead of running it themselves, which is understandable to some degree as running DNS for a large numbers of domains for "free" must've been a lot of work for them and I'm sure Cloudfare made them a great offer, but I fundamentally disagree with. It also caused a few domains from certain TLDs to stop working after the transition and I later had yet another issue with url https forwarding due to DNS verified SSL certs not being issued. I expect from my domain provider that included services are solid and that they never break any aspect of my domains that they're are responsible for.
Nonetheless, apart from this one incident their offerings and support have been outstanding and I would still recommend them.
I came across Namecheap's affiliate marketing program, and they really seemed to treat affiliate marketers like shit. Now, think what you want about marketing, but as a business I'm for treating any business partner with respect, and if you don't like affiliate marketers then don't have the program, but don't have the program then abuse them, especially small time ones.
So, yes, there is something wrong with Namecheap. Perhaps it manifests itself in areas outside their marketing programs too, YMMV, it was enough for me to not go forward with them, an incompatible corporate culture.
My previous registrar actually tried to hold me hostage by registering an expired domain and reselling it to me for absurd rates. I let one domain with Namecheap expire because I never check that email, but they didn't do anything evil, so I'm happy with them.
That excludes most examples people are providing.
The only downside is that they don't have top-level domains that other registrars do, but it is worth checking out.
To compare a popular service, Route53 (no affiliation) limit is 10k and they won't charge extra if you want to increase the limit, all you need to do is open a support ticket explaining the use case.
https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/services/domains
I may switch back to them now that Google sold out to Squarespace.