I was happy with Namecheap until they redesigned their website and included a tonne of JS which slowed everything down. Doing something as simple as changing an A record became unbearably sluggish, and I tend to think I have a fairly high tolerance for that kind of thing.

I gave them a few months to see if it was teething problems with the new design but it persisted. Eventually I moved everything to gandi, which has been better in every way as far as I can tell - cheaper (for me), better website, better features out of the box.

Their online chat support is extremely helpful in my experience

I'm going to have to be the dissenter here.

Namecheap also does domain name front running and tasting, so it's not really any different.

No they don't. At least not in the way that GoDaddy does it... NameCheap does this with domains that have expired and domains that are searched and reserved but fail for some reason. Since part of the service they provide is contingent on covering for people in the event of failures (missed renewals, misspellings, etc.), NameCheap auto-renews domains and reserves variations of others when they're registered. If the user doesn't end up actually renewing the domain, they mark it up and sell it as a premium domain since they now have paid for a domain without a buyer. NameCheap mostly does this as a service for existing customers. GoDaddy, on the other hand, does it explicitly for the revenue they can generate from desperate people who need domains they previously searched for.

Doesn't match my experience. I used them to check the price of A...B...C...D....com.au which was available. A few days later, I came back to register it, just to find that that domain, ABC...D...com.au and ABCD.com.au are reserved and available via auction. Checking with national registrar directly I confirmed the domain is not reserved. With that information I contacted the namecheap support who gave me some direct "add to cart" url which was not normally available.

I don't trust any registrar anymore.

I think you're projecting some ill intent here on the part of NameCheap that may be unwarranted. It's quite possible that someone had purchased the domain but it failed for whatever reason or that the cached version of the whois database that NameCheap was using was outdated. I've tried to register a name from the .AZ (Azerbaijan) registry through multiple sites and was able to successfully place an order only to be refunded because the information in the registry was cached and almost 4 months out of date. Additionally, some registrars are not actually able to register certain TLDs and so they use a proxy service to facilitate the transaction. It's possible that NameCheap isn't even a .com.au registrar and was simply passing along a result from whoever they partner with to fulfill those requests.

I'm not disputing that what happened to you happened the way you describe it but I am disputing that NameCheap did anything nefarious in order for the situation to play out exactly as you've described.

Let me rephrase it. It is not scammy like GoDaddy, but it is scammy like when a newspaper publishes sponsored content.

It is not that important what happened behind the scene. In the end, I went to their site and I saw something that was not clearly marked as an ad. The listing looked almost exactly like their other listings. There, there was a button that said "buy", I clicked it and was unable to buy. It is the responsibility of NameCheap to make sure that their ads are not scammy. Just like if Facebook started showing porn ads, there would be blowback and people will stop using FAcebook.

Ok... but that's completely moving the goalposts from what you said earlier. I disagree that it's not clearly marked as an ad because, even in your screenshot, there's a link and a differentiator that says the domain is coming from Kingcom, not from NameCheap. You can ignore that or say that it's not clear enough for you and that's fine but the debate here was whether or not NameCheap was kiting and front-running domains like GoDaddy and my initial statement said that they were not. Your response was "Yes they do" and that's clearly not the case here.

Correct, I moved the goalpost because, thanks to your comment, I realized that saying that NameCheap is just as scammy as GoDaddy is an exaggeration. Nonetheless, I wouldn't trust a site with ads that outright lie. It's not like we are forced to choose between GoDaddy and NameCheap. There are other options that don't reserve searched domains, and don't show ads that lie. Since that is the case, I will opt for one of those other sites when looking to purchase a domain.

Again, you're projecting malicious intent. What's the difference, in your opinion, between a lie and a mistake? If NameCheap is labelling those domains (again, according to your own screenshot) as coming from a third-party and they get a bad response from that third party, what should their case be? The ad wasn't a lie. A lie assumes that the intent is to defraud or fool you. This sounds more like a mistake that, ultimately, didn't harm you in any way whatsoever.

That being said... you do you. I have no horse in the race with NameCheap. I just think their service is great and the customer support is awesome. If you prefer another registrar, you live your best life there.

I've never experienced this in my 5 or 6 years of using them (not definitively saying it doesn't happen). I frequently search for domains and then come back at a later date to purchase them for the exact price they were originally listed at.

Namecheap is good. Porkbun.com is worth keeping an eye on. I've got a few domains with them. Excellent support and really competitive pricing. gandi.net is also decent for certain international TLDs.

I check https://tld-list.com regularly for ultra cheap renewals. I have two .party domains that I previously renewed for ten years for about $1/year a while ago.

I definitely agree, NameSilo is a smaller registrar but is my go to place for .com while NameCheap has a wider selection of extensions.

I recently got into the first wave of Cloudflare's domain registration, but I have had a pretty good experience with Namecheap over the years. It looks like I can save a few bucks here and there, but my next expiring domain isn't for a few months so hopefully I can read other's experiences by then.

Look at NameSilo.com. Their renewals are less expensive and that includes free domain privacy while NameCheap.com charges for domain privacy after the first year. They also have free 2FA and accept BitCoin.

Porkbun.com is a bit less expensive than NameSilo.com and also offers free domain privacy but I haven't tried it.

Another inexpensive one is NameBright.com but no free domain privacy, but some might prefer it if they don't care about domain privacy. I haven't tried this one either.

Man, namesilo has a LOT of dodgy business going on in domains they register, and don't reply to any emails about it.

They are suspect as all hell.

>NameCheap.com charges for domain privacy after the first year.

Didn't they recently stop that?

Yep, I just renewed a bunch of domains and all privacy was free.

I'll second this. Namecheap is amazing company! Been using them for domains and DNS (smaller scale stuff) for years.