I am looking for a new domain registrar. Tired of all the upsell and horrible customer support. I would like everybody’s opinion on their favorite domain registrar, and why.
I know I’m in a minority, but I’ve been happy with GoDaddy.
I was never unhappy with Hover, though they’ve never put any effort into their email offering. I’m happy with Cloudflare, wholesale prices, good stats and protection since they’re very built into the web, and not just a registrar.
I’ve only experience with NameCheap. They’re no-frills, and they try to get you to buy expensive domain names being resold, but if you ignore all that, you can get as good a price, or better, than the other guys. I never needed their support, but I don’t expect they have a lot… again, they’re very much no-frills.
Cloudflare do everything I need. They are cheap and offers other services like email forwarding, web hosting, reverse proxy. Never had to use their support but their dashboard put everything in your hands.
I’ve used Pair for a long time because they are no-nonsense and don’t try to upsell services. They offer a lot of services with the very low base price and they do offer other services, but they’re not structured to push those services. They’re not constantly reminding you how limited you are because you’re not upgraded to the megs-super tier.
I’ve purchased a half dozen domains through them and they’ve been great the whole time. They have extensive help in configuring things, but you do have to know what you’re doing. It’s not an ‘entry level’ registrar like GoDaddy or one of the other registrars. That said, all the information and all the tools are there to do the job, you just have to know(or learn) how to use them.
Some of the included services like forwarding all/some of the email to a domain to a specific account elsewhere is super handy. It lets me use the email service of my choice to monitor domains email traffic–this has come in handy on a number of occasions.
Funny story to explain that one: My kids school is pretty horrible about sharing parents contact info with seemingly anyone who wants it. The yearbook company (who, if you have ever dealt with one, you know how scummy they are) got all the parents emails and spammed the whole school with solicitations to buy the yearbook. In the midst of my fuming, I noticed they used a school specific domain to send the email–but none of the links in the email went to that site, they went to the main providers site with a school specific suffix in the URL. On a whim, I checked to see if the domain they used was even real–it’s a lot of effort to go through to register a couple dozen domains for the purpose of soliciting yearbook purchases.
To my great joy, they had not registered the domain–some flunkey at the spam side of the business had just guessed at the format hostnames were supposed to look like and got it wrong. Pair let me register the names for my kids schools (I was briefly tempted to pay the couple hundred of dollars to register all the schools in my district, but resisted it). I set them to forward emails to me. And then I waited.
Over the course of the next year (I let the registration lapse) I received several dozen emails. I replied to each of them with an explanation of what I had done and how sloppy the yearbook company had been and how inappropriate it was for the school to be giving out all the parents contact info. A few of them replied and we had some useful discussions. All in all, it was completely worth the few dollars I spent, but I wouldn’t have even considered it if I hadn’t known that Pair would make it super simple for me to setup.
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I use Hover for purchases, and Cloudflare for nameservers.
I’d been using Hover for years, they were one of the first registrars to offer TOTP authentication years ago. No problems with them, but Cloudflare’s extensibility and modern UI are miles ahead. I don’t know if this is still the case, but Cloudflare wasn’t offering some of the newer TLDs for sale, Hover was selling all of them. So I still make purchases through them.
I also kind of like the idea of spreading those roles out between vendors. Eggs in baskets and such.
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I personally just finished migrating from Hover to Namecheap. Nothing specifically wrong with Hover, but I’m liking Namecheap so far.
I’ve used both Hover and Namecheap over the years, but I just recently moved everything I could to Cloudflare, mostly due to using it at work and getting really familiar with it.
Unfortunately, Cloudflare still doesn’t support .ca domains, so I’m still half on Namecheap until they do.