The worst domain name story that happened to me was with my .name domain name, the one I still use for my personal web page.
When I got it, it was only allowed to register subdomains in the form of firstname.lastname.name and I even had to provide my ID card to be able to register the domain name. The deal then was that I could use DNS zone of the subdomain, and in addition got an email redirection from firstname@lastname.name to whatever email address I would choose.
A few years after that, VeriSign suddenly stopped supporting the email redirection feature, with not even a single warning sent to customers like me. From one day to another, I lost the main email address I used to communicate and for all of my online accounts. It was a mess to deal with this.
To this day, I was never able to get hold of my lastname.name, to be able to restore my email address. Even though I'm the only one in the world using a subdomain of it. The only solution that has ever been suggested to me by VeriSign customer support would be to let it expire, and hope that no squatting bots get it before me so once the grace period expires, I can try to register the first-level domain. But that would mean several weeks where my website would be down, and all that with the uncertainty of actually being able to actually get it back.
That was the original idea behind .name. You buy firstname.lastname.name. When it wasn’t a huge success they got bored and it reverted to a regular tld.
At the time the idea of .name was that for example someone with a common family name shouldn't be able to get it only for them and deprive all the other people named like them from having their .name domain and email address. Of course it didn't work for people also having the same first name, and in that case it was still a first come first serve basis.
Anyhow, first level domain were to be "shared", non directly registrable, domains.
Since they decided to open it up for first level registration, there has been no way to get a once-shared first level domain, even when you're its only user.
As a rule of thumb, I never register a ccTLD. You don't know the Geo-politics and baggage that TLD is under. Some countries are incredibly unstable, and that could be reflected in the ccTLD. The only exception is if you are a resident of that country and have a valid passport to reflect you live in that country, and that the domain can be claimed & validated because you live there.
Sometimes ccTLDs bind you to a country you don't live in, and it also signals that you may like/honor that country's practices and history (which you probably don't).
What I do is, choose generic TLDs like .blog and .dev. In the past .tk was considered low-rep because it was free, and it raised red flags, so at least pay for a domain. They're the same price as a T-Shirt!
That can hardly apply to .FR — no-one uses that for domain hacks, it's from a very stable country, and has very wide use within that country.
I'd rather suggest that using the very cheapest service providers means you're risking problems when you need customer support — in this case because notifications were missed due to a broken phone or whatever.
This comments feels very out of touch with reality. Nobody is going to associate your usage of an .ai domain with you honoring or liking Anguilla practices and history. It's a domain, you buy it because it sounds good for your marketing purposes. Unless you get some very obscure ones that might be associated with spammers and blacklisted (like .tk), you are going to be fine and nobody is going to associate you with that country.
Besides, it's highly unlikely you are ever going to have a problem with geopolitics and instability. For most countries it's just free money flowing in, especially with the trending ones (.ai, .io, .tv, .fm).
> The only exception is if you are a resident of that country and have a valid passport to reflect you live in that country, and that the domain can be claimed & validated because you live there.
Isn't that the whole purpose of ccTLDs? In fact, are you sure that your use case for ccTLDs for countries you have no connection with is actually allowed or legitimate?
Every single time I registered a ccTLD the registrar required me to provide documentation that attested I had in fact a relationship with said country, either a valid passport or business details. Frankly, I thought any other scenario was automatically deemed invalid.
Namecheap has gone downhill imho meaning it is no longer the best discount registrar. Meanwhile some more registrars have popped up in the past five years that have better service and are cheaper. Porkbun is one. I also had great experience with namesilo. The only reason I could see people going with nanecheap is they already have an account there or they listen to other people who haven’t evaluated the registrar situation lately.
I moved most of my domains from Namecheap to Cloudflare. I've never had a problem with domain names. But their renewal system is a little aggressive. They send a renewal email 60 days before. At 30 days it automatically renews. So I have a few domains that I forgot to transfer and have to wait another year.
Do any of them keep their word regarding renewal costs? The prices for the initial year always seem good and the next year is shown as something that's usually higher but still reasonable, but what stops them from continuing the trend and just jacking it up once you're invested and force you to either pay anything they want or lose the domain? All of the budget registrars seem shady enough to run that sort of racket, it's predatory pricing 101 after all.
Careful with Cloudflare, they don't let you change nameservers[1]:
> Registrant agrees to use Cloudflare’s nameservers. REGISTRANT ACKNOWLEDGES AND AGREES THAT IT MAY NOT CHANGE THE NAMESERVERS ON THE REGISTRAR SERVICES, AND THAT IT MUST TRANSFER TO A THIRD PARTY REGISTRAR IF IT WISHES TO CHANGE NAMESERVERS.
So it's a no-go if you want to use Route 53 or something like that.
Moved away from them in general two years ago. Their past behavior has shown a severe lack of care for their customer data[0].
Nowadays I use Porkbun + a local provider for the ccTLD belonging to my own country.
Perhaps a stark reminder that with cheap prices, you get treated like a cheap customer.
[0]: The CEO encouraging an activist hacker/criminal to pentest their webportal without any sort of contract or anything in place to prevent them from leaking out their findings and instead going by "lol, time to shitpost about it on twitter" energy is shameful.
It's always been a worry of mine that I might have an issue with renewing some of the domains I really rely on, and that sorting out the problem might take longer than the amount of time I have left before it expires.
So one year, whenever a domain came up for renewal, I bought a two year renewal on it. And since then, I renew all my domains at the same time every year (first week of January, but you could do it any time) when there's between 1 and 2 years left on all of them. If there's ever a problem dealing with the renewal, I've got plenty of time to sort it out.
Yes, the registrar gets to keep (on average) 18 months worth of registration fees on account, as it were, but for me it's worth the peace of mind.
This. Waiting to renew a domain you rely on a few weeks or months before it expires is asking for trouble. Credit card issues, family tragedy, health problem will hit you eventually. Use a service that will renew automatically and/or schedule checks in your calendar.
> Don’t ever use namecheap for any kind of domains. It is the second worse domain registrar exists
When did this happen? Anecdotally, in recent years, I've seen namecheap be the primary recommendation for a domain registrar. When did the public opinion shift like this?
20+ years, fewer domains. Their expiration process is generous. That said, some international domains they sell have a poorly handled expiration process (as noted by the OP). Their upstream provider has a crappy+short grace system. I think NC could offset the harm by having the expiration 30+ days sooner but they don't.
> I also don’t use any other services they have.
I tried mail their mail hosting 10 years ago. They use an open source server and app plugin to mimic Outlook push. It was a disaster and my customer was not happy with me.
The truth of the matter is that namecheap does exactly what it says in the name. I rarely find a cheaper domain name elsewhere.
OP gave us good information on what to do if you’re in this situation but to be frank, the entire situation is their fault. If you are using a domain for your email you need to protect it with your life.
No working payment method no auto-renew, that’s on you. Namecheap emails you reminders at 30 days and 15 days ahead of time. “My phone was broken” is a lame excuse: get your ass to the library if you have to.
In my case, I bought my renewals numerous years ahead of time. The price is only going to get higher anyway, might as well buy them now.
When clicking on the link from my office (which happens to be in a data center) I get this:
> whoa there, pardner! Your request has been blocked due to a network policy. Try logging in or creating an account here to get back to browsing. If you're running a script or application, please register or sign in with your developer credentials here. Additionally make sure your User-Agent is not empty and is something unique and descriptive and try again. if you're supplying an alternate User-Agent string, try changing back to default as that can sometimes result in a block.
These kinds of blanket bans on data center IP's ignore the fact that real humans do use them. As for user-agent, I'm using Firefox on OSX with no user-agent obsfucation plugins.
My office switched to a cloud-hosted network proxy appliance for our internet access. We now get "access blocked" from dozens of websites, including from reddit, simply because the "edge" ip address is technically from a netblock assigned to a data centre.
My personal solution is to boycot companies that do this, and should they come up in conversation mention they arbitrarily block legitimate users from their services
Somewhat related, but does anyone know how to deal with a .us domain? There is no WHOIS privacy with that TLD. A few hours after I bought a .us domain, I started receiving phone calls from all over the world, literally every 5-10 minutes for days, offering services for my “new business” associated with the TLD.
Is there any way to keep legitimate contacts in the registrar without getting a ton of spam?
Readit News
When I got it, it was only allowed to register subdomains in the form of firstname.lastname.name and I even had to provide my ID card to be able to register the domain name. The deal then was that I could use DNS zone of the subdomain, and in addition got an email redirection from firstname@lastname.name to whatever email address I would choose.
A few years after that, VeriSign suddenly stopped supporting the email redirection feature, with not even a single warning sent to customers like me. From one day to another, I lost the main email address I used to communicate and for all of my online accounts. It was a mess to deal with this.
To this day, I was never able to get hold of my lastname.name, to be able to restore my email address. Even though I'm the only one in the world using a subdomain of it. The only solution that has ever been suggested to me by VeriSign customer support would be to let it expire, and hope that no squatting bots get it before me so once the grace period expires, I can try to register the first-level domain. But that would mean several weeks where my website would be down, and all that with the uncertainty of actually being able to actually get it back.
Anyhow, first level domain were to be "shared", non directly registrable, domains.
Since they decided to open it up for first level registration, there has been no way to get a once-shared first level domain, even when you're its only user.
Sometimes ccTLDs bind you to a country you don't live in, and it also signals that you may like/honor that country's practices and history (which you probably don't).
What I do is, choose generic TLDs like .blog and .dev. In the past .tk was considered low-rep because it was free, and it raised red flags, so at least pay for a domain. They're the same price as a T-Shirt!
I'd rather suggest that using the very cheapest service providers means you're risking problems when you need customer support — in this case because notifications were missed due to a broken phone or whatever.
Besides, it's highly unlikely you are ever going to have a problem with geopolitics and instability. For most countries it's just free money flowing in, especially with the trending ones (.ai, .io, .tv, .fm).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chagos_Archipelago_sovereignty...
Isn't that the whole purpose of ccTLDs? In fact, are you sure that your use case for ccTLDs for countries you have no connection with is actually allowed or legitimate?
Every single time I registered a ccTLD the registrar required me to provide documentation that attested I had in fact a relationship with said country, either a valid passport or business details. Frankly, I thought any other scenario was automatically deemed invalid.
some ccTLDs in the EU require you to be a citizen in any EU country. (So .fr or .eu for example)
Examples of the latter are for example .to or .ag, that do not have such requirement.
I actually had no idea such TLDs existed, but apparently they do [1].
[1] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/Route53/latest/DeveloperGuide/do...
Massive price inflation seems to happen with new or trendy TLDs, where an initial $5/year can become $50/year or more.
Cloudflare is the go to unless they don't have the tld.
> Registrant agrees to use Cloudflare’s nameservers. REGISTRANT ACKNOWLEDGES AND AGREES THAT IT MAY NOT CHANGE THE NAMESERVERS ON THE REGISTRAR SERVICES, AND THAT IT MUST TRANSFER TO A THIRD PARTY REGISTRAR IF IT WISHES TO CHANGE NAMESERVERS.
So it's a no-go if you want to use Route 53 or something like that.
[1] https://www.cloudflare.com/domain-registration-agreement/
I learned this the hard way when I had to use route 53 dns and had to wait 60 days to transfer.
I don’t know how this is allowed, registrars should be required to let you set custom dns.
To a French one =)
https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/psa-gandi-net-bought-o...
Nowadays I use Porkbun + a local provider for the ccTLD belonging to my own country.
Perhaps a stark reminder that with cheap prices, you get treated like a cheap customer.
[0]: The CEO encouraging an activist hacker/criminal to pentest their webportal without any sort of contract or anything in place to prevent them from leaking out their findings and instead going by "lol, time to shitpost about it on twitter" energy is shameful.
So one year, whenever a domain came up for renewal, I bought a two year renewal on it. And since then, I renew all my domains at the same time every year (first week of January, but you could do it any time) when there's between 1 and 2 years left on all of them. If there's ever a problem dealing with the renewal, I've got plenty of time to sort it out.
Yes, the registrar gets to keep (on average) 18 months worth of registration fees on account, as it were, but for me it's worth the peace of mind.
When did this happen? Anecdotally, in recent years, I've seen namecheap be the primary recommendation for a domain registrar. When did the public opinion shift like this?
I also don’t use any other services they have.
20+ years, fewer domains. Their expiration process is generous. That said, some international domains they sell have a poorly handled expiration process (as noted by the OP). Their upstream provider has a crappy+short grace system. I think NC could offset the harm by having the expiration 30+ days sooner but they don't.
> I also don’t use any other services they have.
I tried mail their mail hosting 10 years ago. They use an open source server and app plugin to mimic Outlook push. It was a disaster and my customer was not happy with me.
I stick to domains, DNS and DDNS now.
OP gave us good information on what to do if you’re in this situation but to be frank, the entire situation is their fault. If you are using a domain for your email you need to protect it with your life.
No working payment method no auto-renew, that’s on you. Namecheap emails you reminders at 30 days and 15 days ahead of time. “My phone was broken” is a lame excuse: get your ass to the library if you have to.
In my case, I bought my renewals numerous years ahead of time. The price is only going to get higher anyway, might as well buy them now.
> whoa there, pardner! Your request has been blocked due to a network policy. Try logging in or creating an account here to get back to browsing. If you're running a script or application, please register or sign in with your developer credentials here. Additionally make sure your User-Agent is not empty and is something unique and descriptive and try again. if you're supplying an alternate User-Agent string, try changing back to default as that can sometimes result in a block.
These kinds of blanket bans on data center IP's ignore the fact that real humans do use them. As for user-agent, I'm using Firefox on OSX with no user-agent obsfucation plugins.
Is there any way to keep legitimate contacts in the registrar without getting a ton of spam?
There is a ruling that prevents hiding the .us domain registration and contact information or using anonymizing proxy [1]
Your information must be public. Maybe you can try national do not call registry [2] and see if it helps in this particular case.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A7251-2005Mar...
[2] https://www.donotcall.gov