Namecheap just seized and disabled all my domains

I'm planning to migrate out.

I can't believe this is real.

In the last few years they managed to destroy that reputation though.

Especially because domain names are not expensive anyways, a dot com (gold standard of domains) has a cost to registrars of like 11 USD right now, so registrars can charge anywhere between 15 USD and 25 USD, maybe you can find one selling at cost at 11USD or at a loss with promotions even!

But we are talking about saving 10$/year? That's less than 1$/mo. Trying to save 1$/mo is strictly in the terrain of underfunding your business, if you can't allocate enough funds so that Domain costs become a non-issue (and a provider like namecheap stops being attractive) then you will fail in a thousand ways, it's not just about domains at this point.

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.

1) The registrar want to increase its margins.

2) The registry upstream increased their price. For .com, Verisign agreement with ICANN allow Verisign to increase the price by 7% in each of the final four years of every six-year cycle. As such they increased it in 2024 and will do so again on November 1, 2026.

3) The registrar is not a direct registrar and uses a middle man, and the middle man want to increase its margins.

4) The buyer or the registrar is operating on a different currency than the registry, and the registrar is compensating for changes in the currency valuation.

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).

Ahhh crap, there goes the company down the toilet. And they were the place I trusted to buy my domain names from.

Try it for yourself, use their website to explore some domains you might like and watch them register from right under you and price gouge.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_surrounding_GoDa...

Admittedly any company will have it's share of controversies over time. But their history speaks to a value system that doesn't square with some of the foundational values of the internet (openness, decentralisation, user empowerment) imo.

Thankfully (and scarily) they did the same as you -- they removed the 2FA for me via chat so I could log in and reset it :D

I only have one domain left in there now...

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.

I know, Amazon isn't super cool, and are imperfect in a bunch of ways. But at least it appears to be highly configurable and cheap, and Amazon ain't gonna get bought out by private equity and enshittified, legally bullied into oblivion, generally has pretty good quality and competent support, and has plenty of experience in not handing the keys to your castle of services to any random phone caller with a sob story.

Disappointed in the VC move but I don't have any complaints at the moment. I have had good experiences with Cloudflare for other services so feel predisposed to them.

I was taught not to count the margin of your vendors, but you at least need to make sure they have healthy margins so they are happy with your business and not constantly hungry and looking for other sources of income, even if it means betraying you.

Personally I would not want the US government controlling and micro-managing who gets to have a .com domain.

DNS etc can be run by third parties

Joker has no 3rd party scripts on their website, porkbun uses gstatic

But maybe if you have 1 (one) backup domain like mydomain.net then you can host that on another vendor. But I'd rather just fail and focus on restoring at that point, you are still losing all traffic to the main domain, and contacting users with a secondary domain they've never heard off is a security posture nightmare and unprofessional.

Weird argument. Given they're in the US, not complying with US sanctions on Iran isn't an option either.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30507103

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namecheap#Termination_of_servi...

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.

Now what?