What's your favorite provider for buying domains? I want to move away from GoDaddy because its UI is clunky/buggy + I don't like their baiting offers/marketing hacks. I moved some of the domains to Vercel (zeit) gradually because they just have an amazing experience but I thought I will check in with others. Has this been discussed before in remote India? 🙂

I don’t know about “favourite” but I use Google Domains apart from GoDaddy.

I prefer AWS • consolidated billing • no chance of losing domain due to Credit Card issues • Most of my apps are always deployed on AWS so domain verification is easier for SES, Route53 and ACM • No predatory pricing and then squeezing money out of you after a year

Namecheap. Clean UI. No BS. Fair pricing

I’ve been using Namecheap too pretty simple & fair pricing

Namecheap

I like Google Domains because of its convenience and free WHOIS privacy. I don't have to pay extra to hide that information.

Cloudflare or namecheap

A lot of my friends, colleagues use Google Domains. I personally use NameCheap because I have most of my domains on there and it has never given me any trouble. This is one I’ve been meaning to check out though - https://porkbun.com/

Namecheap has a nice UI and free WHOIS privacy. Been with them for a decade. It is also well-covered when setting up more complex DNS/MX structures since other websites tend to have examples on how to do something in Namecheap.

I am using Porkbun for some time now. It's serving me pretty well, so never found any reason to go elsewhere.

Namecheap is my go to.

Haven't had a great experience with GoDaddy either, shifted to Domains(dot)com, and now to Google domains.

👍 Thanks for the recommendations, looks like namecheap gets a bunch of love and is pretty old. I will give it a go (I like the idea of using AWS as well)

Porkbun or Cloudflare domains these days. Namecheap is almost always expensive (than them).

I moved my 30+ domains to Namecheap (mostly .coms, some ins, nets and orgs) after I did a comparison and found that I ended up saving about 30% renewal costs from GoDaddy even without adding in coupon codes. Plus namecheap will charge your CC automatically - no BS like some GoDaddy rep calling you and trying to upsell stuff. GoDaddy became like an insurance company - transferred all domains out.

I have been using Namecheap for years. Never heard of porkbun before, will definitely check it out.

Yup, NC charged me 20 for my domain renewal whereas it was around 8-13 on Porkbun and Cloudflare.

@rough-autumn-89795 I don’t easily see a price list for Cloudflare domains. Is the renewal price same as the purchase price? Cloudflare is actually cheaper than Porkbun as well. $8.03 on CF - which is like 50c cheaper than Porkbun. But not sure about the features such as Free Whois protection, etc? Out of Porkbun & CF which would you recommend (both do not support .in registrations though)

@loud-glass-33663 Looks like they offer free Whois protection

Cloudflare Registrar will also be offering personal data redaction on WHOIS, that meets current ICANN guidelines, for free. Broadcasting the registrant contact information, via the WHOIS service, can invite mountains of spam to your personal addresses. Like your domain, your privacy should not come at a markup.

https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-registrar/

@loud-glass-33663 Yes, afaik CF renewal price is same as purchase price. Porkbun has more features, has WHOIS for free, gives email forwarding as well. Currently, I use Porkbun for not-so-important domains. Like,

<http://aviaryan.com|aviaryan.com>

is important, so it’s on CF but some side project domain that’s not making money is not, so it’s on Porkbun. For

.in

, I use Godaddy.

Just a heads up here, Namecheap renewals used to be super cheap as well. Porkbun is comparatively newer/less popular and will probably eventually bump their prices at some point. So unless you’re okay with moving your domains every time you see another provider providing a cheaper service, it might not necessarily be a great idea. And, if I am not wrong, most domains have a transfer fee involved as well, right?

@helpful-raincoat-87337 No. When you transfer out, you actually get +1 year of extension for most TLDs. The only thing is that it is a pain to transfer the domain out. I transferred one domain from Namecheap -> Cloudflare. I am going to test this out. CF claims to not charge any markup and because they make tonnes of money from other services, I think they will keep this going forward. The downside ofcourse is that they don’t offer SALEs or discounts on new domain registrations - but that is totally fair. I’d rather pay full (reduced) price throughout rather than get a 50% off on year 1 and then 150% on following years.

Yeah, I guess there’s a better chance of that with CF than with Porkbun. Is there any other benefit of moving to CF apart from the price? I use them on all my projects anyway so might be worth looking into.

In my limited experience of moving ~3-4 domains, I haven’t had to pay transfer fees.

There is a negative that you need use their DNS servers. You cannot use a third party DNS server to use CF. So only if your domain is added, you can add / renew it from them.

Yep, email forwarding was the reason I started looking at Porkbun but there was another nice project that I came across. I’ll try to find the link found it. Regarding CF, is there an issue with that? All my Namecheap domains are on CF DNS actually or is your issue the fact that changing it isn’t an option?

No I can change it - but I use CF only for production systems. Other domains - not so much. So it will additional work to move domains to CF - not much as most is automated. But still - thoda extra work is there.

I've been with name.com for almost a decade now. Primary reason to prefer it at the time I started was clean UI/UX as compared to GoDaddy or BigRock or Register.com. Haven't had a reason to move out yet.Regarding renewal cost, I align with @helpful-raincoat-87337's views. Renewal cost on any registrar would be placed alongside competitive values, unless it were a newcomer who wanted to roll discounts to capture market.

+1 for porkbun, have been loving it…. If you don’t mind the Chinese origin alibaba clould domains is also really cheap, their renewal rates seem to be the same as the first year rates (for now)