As a namecheap customer I completely support the greenfield approach to what it means to be a registrar. However, what I want from a registrar is to be the best registrar. I don’t want hosting, email, or other services, I want a great DNS interface with an API that I can scope permissions on, and cheap and predictable name registration. That is it.
I'm with you, including NC customership and excluding a want of registrars to provide even DNS, let alone mail and hosting.
That said, GoDaddy makes about half of it's annual revenue from it's 'core' business (domain name sales) over again in 'apps and commerce' (stuff you and I don't, but clearly many other less enlightened people want).
The 'A&C' segment grew 13% in 2023 as opposed to 2% of core business.
I don't think it has to be an either/or thing, solong as a registrar isn't employing all sorts of dark patterns and ruining UX for the sake of upsell opportunities.
I feel like this is the sort of thing Alphabet was supposed to do, but instead Google’s ad machine steamrolled any actually new ideas and even now, after having OpenAI start to take a bite of their lunch, Google’s ad business is calling all the shots on what is/isn’t allowed to be built.
If Google had the guts to put a bunch of teams in a new company under alphabet with the explicit goal to disrupt Google Search via any means necessary they’d be in a much better positions today.
Real respect to Namecheap, this takes guts to commit too.
I used and was impressed by Namecheap EasyWP, which seems to be part of what they’ve folded into Spaceship. They really delivered on high performance, serverless, cheap WordPress. Moreover, they proved that Namecheap doing greenfield produces starkly better results than what I’d come to expect from their main website and last-gen hosting.
However, EasyWP also ultimately lost me because they just never implemented DMARC/DKIM/SPF or automatic backups. I’m on board with necessary cuts to legacy and ecosystem compat, but missing these features isn’t that, it’s just an incomplete website – and solving it with plugins and manually synced external services significantly detracts from the value prop. And I’m not seeing either feature explicitly advertised on spaceship.com.
After a quick chat with support, Spaceship also supports neither DMARC/DKIM/SPF on website-sent emails, nor automatic backups. They recommended using a third party plugin to connect the web hosting part to the personal email hosting part, but even then you just get SPF and DKIM, not DMARC.
Namecheap got at least one domain from me as a Google Domains refugee. Most went to Porkbun, but there were a few domains with comparatively esoteric TLDs that only Namecheap supported.
Not sure how this qualifies as "disrupting itself". Namecheap sells domain names. Spaceship (as far as I can tell) is domains + hosting + email. So it's not like they are taking anything away from their core offering, just providing add-on services, all with a shiny new UI. Funny enough Namecheap itself already offers all of those things, so this is basically a rebrand (probably to sound more premium and enterprise-y than "Namecheap").
It took me a lot of scrolling to figure out what services were actually being offered. Sounds like pretty standard cpanel hosting. Glad to see this service from a reputable and well liked provider. Is this a disruptive idea in 2024?
I'm honestly tempted by the shared hosting because of the price alone. No, I wouldn't host anything too serious there but that's way cheaper than I've seen from someone like DreamHost (where I have an old account that's not worth migrating super old sites from 10+ years ago off). I'd like to move my blog off wordpress.com and have a semi-managed WP instance instead (so I don't have to pay Wordpress and arm and a leg for plugins). I don't want to manage a VPS, I do enough of that for my day and side job and I did that for many years for my blog and hated it.
Readit News
That said, GoDaddy makes about half of it's annual revenue from it's 'core' business (domain name sales) over again in 'apps and commerce' (stuff you and I don't, but clearly many other less enlightened people want).
The 'A&C' segment grew 13% in 2023 as opposed to 2% of core business.
If Google had the guts to put a bunch of teams in a new company under alphabet with the explicit goal to disrupt Google Search via any means necessary they’d be in a much better positions today.
Real respect to Namecheap, this takes guts to commit too.
Moving forward with historical debt is very difficult and risky. However, at the same time, it also requires managers to have a clear understanding.
However, EasyWP also ultimately lost me because they just never implemented DMARC/DKIM/SPF or automatic backups. I’m on board with necessary cuts to legacy and ecosystem compat, but missing these features isn’t that, it’s just an incomplete website – and solving it with plugins and manually synced external services significantly detracts from the value prop. And I’m not seeing either feature explicitly advertised on spaceship.com.
They're doing pretty well. Reminds me of Linode.