Namecheap just seized and disabled all my domains
reddit.com176 points by sashk 3 hours ago
176 points by sashk 3 hours ago
Namecheap gave my account to an unverified third party
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49028037
Namecheap banned a few domain names purely based on an ambiguous tweet that got 6 likes
https://x.com/Namecheap/status/1489485337885921284
Namecheap suspended Imgur in 2013 for 1 CSAM image out of millions
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5276648
Namecheap snipes your domains
A namecheap bug got my domain suspended: https://captnemo.in/blog/2026/05/05/namecheap-whois/
I'm planning to migrate out.
namecheap purchased by private equity CVC in 2025 for $1.5B
so costs need to go down (-human support + ai automation)
and prices go up (they increased i think .com 3 times this year alone)
Is there a directory of private equity acquisitions? Maybe even a browser extension that flags the websites of acquired companies.
Such acquisitions are often due to founders cashing out or retiring, and the first thing private equity does is switch gears to "extraction mode". As such, I would think twice before (a) making a long-term commitment to their services, or (b) spending time applying for a job there.
Ohhh so that’s why I got those price increases emails. Yay. What are some good alternatives?
I've been very happy with Porkbun. https://porkbun.com
I moved my domains to Porkbun some years ago when Google sold their domain stuff to Squarespace. Absolutely no headaches, and the one time i got double-charged after an API error during checkout, it was solved within 15 minutes with a human. I recommend them a lot.
Do you know if they support dynamic DNS? I self host most of my stuff and I have a dynamic IP at home
Yes, in that they have an API for their DNS service. It's supported by ddns-updater.
Same here. Recently migrated quite a few domains from Namecheap to Porkbun and it only took a matter of minutes.
And porkbun, a seemingly privately owned company, isn't private equity?
Private Equity vs Private Ownership
The first is a vampire looking to take what was publicly or even privately owned, extract every last dollar and leave the shell with the debt of buying the next victim.
Private Ownership is Valve or Porkbun - The people running the business want to make a profit but not to their own or their customers determent.
Not in the sense that anyone means when they say private equity?
You mean how it's always used post hoc (ie. "ah ha! the company was owned by private equity! you should've known!") or as a generic kneejerk reaction, neither of which has any rigorous criteria for what the "bad" sort of private equity is?
> the "bad" sort of private equity
People mean "acquired by a Private Equity firm". You can learn what one of those is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_equity_firm
Moved over after Gandi’s acquisition by PE and then price hikes. Hope Porkbun stays legit for at least another decade.
I abuse https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/ as a domain registrar. I really like their astetic(pre pay, simple, no fluff) but it turns out the sort of stuff I want to run on the internet is a poor match for their infrastructure so don't actually use nfsn in their primary web host role.
I use nfs as host too. Didn't know they did registrar. Thanks.
Ya every time I installed a slightly involved CMS it was a broken headache for some technical reason, so I gave that up. Made my own superuninvolved CMS and that works fine.
Porkbun. Cloudflare if you don't mind being locked into using them for DNS too.
Id caution against using Cloudflare for DNS. They rewrite your CAA record so multiple other CAs can sign certs on your domains. It's non-obvious unless you query your own CAA record
Source/writeup somewhere? The amount of domains that use CF must be staggering, so if this was a real threat being leveraged in the wild you'd think it would be an epidemic no??
It's not a threat.
Most websites don't use CAA records at all. The records can only narrow what CAs are acceptable down from the end user's root trust store, they can't add new CAs to it. And CloudFlare is typically in charge of managing its customers' certificates, so they add CAA records for their own CAs.
If you don't trust CF to manage your certs, you are not in their target market and generally should not use their products.
https://developers.cloudflare.com/ssl/reference/certificate-...
Many people use cloudflare for DNS. Few people use cloudflare for domain name purchases as that feature is much newer.
OP specifically said "using Cloudflare for DNS..." ? I wasn't talking about domain name registration and don't think OP was either?
Damnit. I liked them for their simplicity, lack of bullshit, and cheaq costs. Know any recommended alternatives? (Edit: Nevermind, I see are suggestions elsewhere in this discussion).
>namecheap purchased by private equity CVC in 2025 for $1.5B
Ahhh crap, there goes the company down the toilet. And they were the place I trusted to buy my domain names from.
And well, business goes down.
I purchased a domain name from them yesterday, in addition to a few I already had.
This will be the last purchase unless I see some significant traction in the case we're discussing in particular, and company wide in general.
Hope others will do the same. Not punishing this behavior is encouraging such abuse in the entire industry (if Namecheap gets away with that, everyone else will follow).
I remember years and years ago moving all my domains to Namecheap because they were considered "the good guys." I suppose I'm going to have to start looking around once again to see who are currently the good guys.
yep, social approval and good faith will always get you constant business (word of mouth - recommendations).
but "numbers guys" say no, we need squeeze profits short term..
IMO Cloudflare is the closest thing to a "good guy" these days. Very customer friendly, affordable and generally fairly ethical (if you pass over the part where they share data with the NSA).
I like Cloudflare as a company but I’d be weary about paying for my domains and hosting my DNS with the same publicly traded company with a severe lack of public customer service outside devs getting mad on twitter (guilty!).
If cloudflare gets mad at you (even accidentally) and cancels your account then you lose everything. At least if you separate them, there is a chance that you won’t lose access to both at one time. Given that domains are generally a one time setup after purchase (especially if you use cloudflare for DNS) then I think the minor inconvenience is worth it, personally.
Yea they did something like this with us. Fully turned off our business domain because we didn’t reply to a phishing email in 48 hours. We migrated out the next day once we got it resolved. It took over 6 hours from when we noticed the issue and responded until they turned it back on. Absolutely horrible service.
Who did you move to? I used to use google domains before they sold and and am not sure who is decent anymore
Mythic beasts
Not currently using any of their services, but I’d trust Mythic Beasts a very great deal based on previous dealings.
Out of curiosity where are people going for their domains. I have a GoDaddy because changing seems like a task that would be more annoying than it is worth and that is even if you can find a place that is better.
This is just my jaded take but I suspect that whomever is good today may be gone in the not too distant future. I have been watching registrars get gobbled up by investment groups that have no knowledge of or interest in DNS. They seem to be milking these registrars and leaving behind broken husks.
There should probably be a deadpool board that lists all the registrars and lets people bet on which will be the last ones standing. I am going to guess a couple of the last ones standing (that still have something resembling technical staff) will be Amazon and Cloudflare and to be clear I did not say anyone can reach their technical staff.
Whatever the consensus will ultimately be in this thread this week will probably be registrars we perform libation for in the coming years.
Cloudflare. They sell at cost, and their entire business is around DNS and caching so they have no reason to decide to stop selling domains in the future or mess with us.
I've used porkbun.com for a bit. I've had no complaints, and at least when I looked initially their prices were pretty good.
+1 for Porkbun
The only downside is that they use Cloudflare DNS behind the scenes, so when Cloudflare goes down, your website goes down too unless you use third-party DNS.
But for end-users not using CF DNS... if the domain used third-party DNS, wouldn't that be enough? Since the TLD servers keep their own mapping of authoritative DNS servers for every domain, it's not asking CF to resolve DNS for your domain.
Yes.
You can always use third-party DNS if that's what you wish to do. That should be a supported configuration with ~any registrar (and if it isn't, avoid them).
You can run your own (first-party!) authoritative nameserver(s) for your domain, if you want to, and you can even do this on hardware that you can see and kick. A nameserver isn't particularly hard to set up in a sensible fashion.
However it happens, eliminating Cloudflare's DNS from the equation is easy. The TLD nameservers (for .com or .net or whatever) will cheerfully direct resolvers towards whatever nameserver(s) you specified as part of your domain registration.
After that, when Cloudflare DNS dies on any random Tuesday afternoon, your domain will still work. (Maybe it won't work for those using Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1, but those people may have bigger issues on that particular Tuesday.)
Have you dealt with their customer service? Namecheap also seems fine to me, but I have also never been in a situation like OP’s.
I've always used Joker. Never heard anything bad about them or had any problems.
Same here. This is the first time I've ever heard anyone else even mention them!
I was a Joker costumer for more than 20 years, since the early 2000s, but recently switched because of a series of compounding bad experiences in just the past 3 years on top of their unusually high prices.
Edit: I feel that it's pertinent to point out one of these experiences that were particularly bad. About two years ago I tried to register an IDN (internationalized domain name) with them. The registration succeeded according to their interface. Money was deducted. The domain did not appear in my inventory. My support ticket took several days to receive attention and was just closed with the almost arrogant response, "you probably did some mistake", with no further information or support. My second support ticket, too, took several days to get a response, and it was then revealed that the problem was that they weren't capable of registering IDNs under that specific TLD, for unknown reasons. That support ticket was also closed without allowing me to response, so I had to open a third ticket just to get my money back.
Porkbun. Do not go with Cloudflare, even if their at-cost pricing seems attractive - at some point you may wish to run your own name server, and Cloudflare does not allow this for domains you keep with them, because the traffic data is of obvious interest to them. Last I checked (admittedly not recently) they were also incapable of holding premium domain names, which may or may not matter to you.
There's a reason it's called Namecheap not Namesafe.
Indeed. Personally I would never pay for any service whose name includes the word "cheap" (it's literally why I gave this one a wide berth despite all the breathless recommendations here and elsewhere). Cheapness should never be the declared mission of a business, it should be the incidental by-product.
I'm an Iranian---which is something you have no choice in, you just turn 4~5 and understand enough language that they tell you that you are an Iranian. And well out of believing namecheap is a good company (since I had my DNS there) I purchased my domain from them. Then one day these fuckers banned my domain, and my access to the dashboard without any warnings or headsup, didn't even allow me to move my domain to somewhere else, and those vultures from GoDaddy bought it in the auction and have put it for 3500€... Horrible people
>I'm an Iranian---which is something you have no choice in
Weird argument. Given they're in the US, not complying with US sanctions on Iran isn't an option either.
Yeah, but you don't have to be such horrible people about it. At least give the person a few days to move their stuff. And I wasn't checking it from Iran.
> Yeah, but you don't have to be such horrible people about it. At least give the person a few days to move their stuff.
That’s not how sanctions work. A company can’t knowingly service a customer under sanctions. If your account was termination for sanction related reasons, they have no choice but to shut it down as fast as possible once they know that fact.
They cannot continue to service it for a few days or even service transfer requests. It’s a hard stop.
This is likely due to government sanctions rather than anything the registrar had control over.
They requested presentation of a phone number and ID, so this sounds like info harvesting (for laundering / resale).
Between 2014 and 2018, Namecheap was a solid provider, and my experiences back then were consistently positive.
Does this mean we should not always entrust our domains with only one registrar?
This gave me the final kick to finally move away from Namecheap
If you have still X years remaining of a registered domain, do those years move as well or do you lose them, if you move registrar?
Yes. You usually get +1 year to existing expiration date of your domain, at least this is how it works for .com, .us and few other tlds I have.
What are good alternatives to namecheap?
I'm on EuroDNS as domain registrar for many years, parked there a couple of companies where I worked. They don't have scammy vibe of other registrars, have multi-user accounts, which is convenient for businesses.
infomaniak.ch is swiss, and (relatively) good. Lacking features overall (though their domain+DNS is solid), but at least no bullshit like this
Could they also get bought by private equity? It seems a lot of things get bought by this
Short of sanctioned jurisdictions pretty much anything can get purchased. You just get a local corporate lawyer to help straighten things out
Hetzner, OVHcloud are decent European options. I migrated to them after geopolitical risks with US providers got too high. No problems so far.
this is one of the worst trends in modern time - "AML" and "KYC" being shoved into everything, requiring you to attach your own identity into everything and send your ID/passport to vendors left and right, no right to privacy at all.
These companies may as well be citing Ron Swanson's park ordinances for all the relevance those regulations have to their data collection demands.
Absolutely agree—it's disgusting. I use Njalla for my domain even though they aren't a free speech provider, at all, I likely won't come into conflict with them and they won't require KYC.
I’ve found really great but quite unique .com domain names available on name cheap then mysteriously gone registered to name cheap within hours, available for purchase at thousands.
Always strenuously denied by the name cheap CEO “we do not front run domain names!”.
I’d never do a domain name check there again.
Namecheap cannot be trusted. I purchased a domain for a "normal" price (and yes, I have receipts). Shortly after they realized they fucked up, voided the purchase, and made it a $1,500 premium domain. Obviously, my recommendation is to avoid Namecheap.
this is going to be an unpopular opinion, but this was the inevitable result of changing a function with trivial cost and broad social utility (name registration) from a public service to a commercial one. at the time we heard a lot of standard arguments about the innovation and competition that only a market based solution could bring. its really not a surprise that this is the kind of innovation that resulted.
Yes - domain registries should be run by the government.
DNS etc can be run by third parties
Nominet does yet they outsource.
Besides, which government do you want to run .com domains
How would that help? The government could still block domains registered by people in adversarial countries.
Personally I would not want the US government controlling and micro-managing who gets to have a .com domain.
If you still did business with them after this, it's your own fault and you deserve everything they're doing to you:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30504812
(Before reacting to the headline, please read at least some of the discussion.)
I read this particular comment[0] and I can't say that I understand the connection you're suggesting. If I ran a company and a country was directly attacking the city were ~1k of my employees live[1], I wouldn't want to continue to do business with them either.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30507103
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namecheap#Termination_of_servi...
No, I don’t see how one follows from the other. Most of us are not Russian and don’t have websites NC would consider relevant to the war.
On the other hand, most of us probably can imagine not checking our email for three days, getting caught up in some automated purgatory, and experiencing customer neglect. We can imagine this because it is the default customer experience these days.
Well you know I don't see how 'registered in Russia' has anything to do with the war. In 2022 alone about 1.5m people emigrated, and are still 'registered in Russia'.
This was a poorly thought-out virtue-signalling knee-jerk back then and of course everyone in their right mind transferred their domains out because this is not how you do business.
Are you trying to suggest that the issue in the current post has the same underlying cause (not doing business with countries on the other side of a war)?
Mh, if anything, this would make me want to do business with them more.
Now what?