Ted from Namecheap here. We have launched a new beta registrar, Spaceship.com, which has wholesale pricing on most extensions. A reminder that wholesale pricing is set by each TLD’s registry, not us.
Would love your feedback on this early version of Spaceship.
I consolidated my domains on Namecheap, but this behavior pisses me off enough to move ALL of them. And I have dozens. Right after I post this screed I'm going to deactivate auto-renewal on every goddamned one.
Don't rip us off and then launch a new service and point to it saying, "Hey look, since you caught us ripping you off, try this one!"
How would you call this ripping you off? Seems like quite the stretch here. Namecheap is a business — we can choose to take a markup on registrations, which by nature is transparent given that wholesale prices are public.
Spaceship has been in the works for years and it’s something we’re excited about, hence why I’m letting you know about it.
You've been called out right here for pretending that the price increase is out of Namecheap's control, when in fact the vast majority of it is Namecheap's markup.
spaceship.com has a "sale" on .com domains, $7.88 now and $8.80 list price. since both of those are lower than the current fee of $9.15, how is anyone expected to trust that the price will not increase in the future if you're selling them at a loss?
We are committed to having competitive pricing at Spaceship for the long term. If you’re concerned, you can also lock in current pricing with multi-year registration.
Fwiw, you could say the same about anyone else in the market. Wholesale pricing is controlled by the registry, retail pricing can be updated by the registrar at any time.
No. You're creating a pain in the ass for Namecheap customers. Your only chance of keeping my business (and probably that of other pissed-off customers) is to give us a one-click way to migrate all of our domains to your new "less of a rip-off" brand.
I'm not about to reward a company that WASTES MY TIME by shuffling my business between THEIR brands. I will make damned sure that my next registrar has nothing to do with Namecheap.
One click migration is not out of the question. Super early days for Spaceship. There’s no shuffling happening here, I’m simply letting you know about a new platform we’re excited about.
The .io infrastructure under ICB was indeed quite slow. Everything moved to Afilias (and now Donuts) many years ago though and EPP is quite performant now fortunately.
We deal with a few independent ccTLDs these days that are still horribly unreliable though. Not going to name any names but some of these are quite popular and still either don't run on EPP and/or run on an old outdated server in a local DC.
Ted from Namecheap here. Donuts, who now operates the .io TLD, is only increasing the wholesale price by ~10%. We are still obviously not happy about this since it's always our goal to ensure that domain pricing is as accessible as possible to our customers.
It would appear that Gandi has just chosen to substantially increase their markup as part of this Donuts update. Our pricing will likely only increase a small amount, if at all.
Former Namecheap customer here, thank you for the transparancy. (I only left Namecheap because of the interface, I found that Dynadot was comparable in price and features, but with a nicer GUI. NC seems like a good company otherwise, so I'm always open to the possibility of switching back.)
Sorry to hear you had trouble with our interface. We do have some pretty substantial updates planned for 2022 and would love to have you back. Feel free to shoot any feedback to ted [at] namecheap.com.
Ted, thank you so much for participating in this thread! Namecheap provides excellent service, and I've been a happy customer for years.
As someone who owns ~30 domain names split between Namecheap and GoDaddy, it would be incredibly beneficial if you overhauled the primary domain list view. As it stands right now, your domain list UI is bulky and clunky and requires several clickthroughs to show all domains or sort effectively.
The first view you see should show a glorified table / spreadsheet view of all domains on the same page by default. A reasonable pagination limit would work for extremely large accounts, but in general I think many people would want to see everything in one place if possible.
It would further be fantastic if the domains were immediately sortable on multiple dimensions (name, expiration, tag/category) and had an integrated search box.
Tags are also really important. The tag system you have in place right now is rather useless, because you can't leverage it easily from the main view. You have to navigate away to an entirely separate product area, and even then they don't provide much assistance.
I tag my domains to group them by project. (eg. vocodes.com, vo.codes, fakeyou.com, fakeyou.app, etc. are grouped together.) It'd be really great for this to feel first class and be integrated into the primary domain view as an additional set of filters.
Godaddy used to suck in this department, but they've really upped their game. Their domain list is top notch and gives Namecheap's UI a run for its money, which is a real reversal. You used to have the best in the business.
I really abhor GoDaddy since they allowed an old high school friend of mine to break into my account and steal strategywiki.org ~15 years ago. (For those interested, I've posted the story on HN before and it should be searchable.) The only reason I have any business with them at all is because of domain marketplace purchases. Grudges aside, their product has evolved over the last few years and is really good. I'd use it as a reference point.
Passing all of your helpful feedback to our Domains PM. Thank you. As I mentioned in another comment, we're developing a new dashboard experience among other things, which we're really excited about.
Does that update include the ability to dynamically update a host's IPV6 address via a request to dynamicdns.park-your-domain.com? The guide [0] mentions that
>It is only possible to dynamically update IPv4 addresses (A records) at this time. Currently, IPv6 is not supported by our Dynamic DNS.
Is there any particular thing blocking this feature from being available for IPV6?
The interface may be a little clunky, but they provide better support than any other domain or SSL vendor, which always gives them the advantage in my book.
Support is core to our business and always our main focus but so is UX. We are admittedly a bit behind in improving our dashboard but can promise you that we have already started developing a radically updated experience and will be ready in the nearish future.
I just registered a domain with them the other day, and there didn't seem to be any egregious dark patterns. Are you talking about anything in specific?
Of course they present options during the checkout process, which is slightly forward, but reasonable as a business.
However, (1) the defaults for all add-ons are do-not-buy, (2) the buttons to navigate to the next screen are clear (not swapped, minimized, etc). But that may have just been my settings / environment?
TBF to Gandhi, IIRC they tend to give favourable prices when you buy domains or deposit funds in bulk. Their opening tier of prices are indeed pricey. Their API is excellent though.
I've always found Namecheap to be price competitive and their customer service is pretty good also. API was always a bit basic (think that had a lot to do with enom implementation)
I'm sure they do indeed have special pricing for bulk customers. Although, not sure how much has changed with them since they were acquired by private equity a couple of years ago.
I do admit that our API needs some love - fortunately we have a lot of major backend updates in the works and a new API will follow at some point. Unrelated but we did roll out a new API (entirely separate from the API you're referring to) for our Auctions platform: https://documenter.getpostman.com/view/12017783/TW6wKUfy. Curious to get your feedback if you're interested in taking it for a spin!
Which means that Gandi is in fact reducing its relative margin. I'm curious about you opinion on this. In particular, how different are bulk and promotion prices ?
Thanks Ted for the update. I bought my io domain from you guys many years ago when it was $70 or so. Thanks for keeping the price low over the years and for the update.
What about the future increase of .sh? I own one for personal stuff, and it's apparently going to increase from ~40€ to ~73€ which is a bit hard to swallow for personal use.
We left namecheap bc it lived up to its name: we were harassed by defective copyright notices that were copied to namecheap. Instead of forwarding them to us, you sent us an ultimatum that you would drop our DNS. We even had our General Counsel draft you a letter, only to have it repeated. Then we understood that we should just drop the vigilante registrar
Have been 7 years with networksolutions and very happy.
I use Namecheap to host more than 10 domains and some shared hosting, and found customer support to be awesome! Just wanted to mention it. Wondering if you have a special promo plan for guys like me that depend on Namecheap for all their personal and business domains?
Thanks for the transparency and great service! I have all but one of my domains there now (register.com had a deathgrip on until I got fed up with their process and let it lapse. Now it sits available for $370, which I'm not willing to shell out)
Thanks for the great service. I used to have all my registration through Dyn (nee DynDNS.org); when they got bought out by Oracle and started moving everything over I moved to Namecheap. Been perfectly happy since.
We would love to and we are always striving to get as close to wholesale as possible but we do have operating costs — domains are essentially our core business and we have 1,000+ CS agents + a large risk/abuse team that works around the clock to focus on the customer experience. Anyone who is selling domains with no markup at all is taking a loss in some form and/or treating it as a loss leader for other products.
No plans for that. We have never even taken any investment and luckily have been growing substantially over the last few years as a bootstrapped company.
I'm not familiar with this particular case and I'm sorry that you had a bad experience but most of you what have said here is incorrect and frankly absurd. We're a US-based company and most of our executives and owners are US/UK citizens. After over a decade with the company, I've never seen a domain "drop" because of a "backend fault." There are certainly quirky edge cases with obscure registries where bugs can occur but if we're talking a major TLD then it is highly unlikely. Feel free to email me if you want me to dig into it though: ted [at] namecheap.com.
This is what I was told by an attorney. That in (the attorney) doing an asset check they revealed that NameCheap simply has a virtual office in a Regus office space with little to no US assets. Further, that even if we went through the struggle of getting a judgement against NameCheap's US entity that getting cash out might be impossible. If anyone reading this wants to verify you can look at Namecheap's site where they list their US address as "4600 E Washington St". If anyone has ever interfaced with any staff at Namecheap it's very clear that 100% of the support and middle management is located in the Ukraine. Just because you have some executives living in the US with a virtual office somewhere doesn't make you a US organization.
I've been all up and down the contact chain with Namecheap and quite frankly every time I make a stink about it in a public forum it's always the same playbook. "Yes a mistake was made, no we can't compensate you." Here is the reply from your support where you admit a fundamental systems flaw resulted in my domain being dropped:
"My name is Oksana and I am the Shift Leader of Domains Department.
I would like to follow-up with you with regard to the issue you have faced with your domain name.
We are very sorry that such unpleasant situation happened. We have reported it to our Technical team and they are doing their best to fix the issue that affected your domain renewal so that similar situations would not occur again. While we cannot change what has happened, we are planning to take steps to ensure that similar incidents and misunderstandings will not occur in the future. Unfortunately, we do not have any ETA on the fix implementation.
Rest assured that as soon as there are any updates on this improvement, we will inform you via the ticket.
Regretfully, we will not be able to recover your domain name, as it expired and later was re-registered by another Registrant.
As a compensation for this negative experience you have faced, we can offer you the XXXX coupon code. You can use it to receive a 20% discount for registration, renewal, and transfer of domains."
To add some circumstantial evidence, Namecheap currently has 52 job openings, of which 47 are in Ukraine, 1 each are in Portugal and India, and 3 are remote: https://www.namecheap.com/careers/openings/
I was simply saying it is incorrect to say that we are not a US-based company. We have a large support team in Europe but we were founded in the US and remain a US entity. We have always been a distributed company with remote teams all around the world. It is indeed absurd that their attorney suggested that they would have to through the "Ukraine court system."
This decision hurts the consumer/registrant in the end, making future registrations and renewal costs less accessible to a lot of markets.
For clarity, this $8.39 amount will become the wholesale cost to the registrar — we of course need to markup on top of that to cover our processing costs, overhead to offer great support, mitigate abuse, etc. Registrars do the heavy lifting in delivering the core user experience — we see none of this margin and the consumer does not see any incremental value from this hike by the registry.
Namecheap stands against removing price caps and allowing these incremental price hikes that only hurt the consumer.
Ted, I've used namecheap for years and I love it. One thing though, when I visit namecheap while using a VPN it makes me fill out a cloudflare captcha. Any way to stop that? Considering I have already paid you money, you have my address, name, phone number, etc. it seems a bit ridiculous to ask for a captcha when visiting using a VPN.
Captcha is likely being triggered by Cloudflare. We have heard this feedback in this past and have listened but it's always a tricky balance of fighting abuse/bots and presenting an extra step for the user.
I put this on my signup form and have had zero spam since, and it has very little impact on user experience. The fact that it doesn't feed the google surveillance machine is a bonus.
HCaptcha is not without problems, it is monetized by selling ML model training to 3rd parties, where the images and the labelling requests come from. Personally, I do not wish to be employed to train ML models of 3rd parties unknown to me. I have no idea about what model I'm helping train and what it is going to be used for. Transparency in this regard would go a long way towards making HCaptcha friendlier (I'm not going to talk about the ethics of free labor this time, though those too ought to be discussed.)
I have the same problem with VPN. I get captcha on so many websites over and over it's ridiculous. Sometimes on different pages of the same domain! It used to be you only got captcha for form submissions. But somewhere along the line you started getting it for simply visiting web pages as well. Part of me wonders if I'm just getting played by these companies into labelling all their training sets for them.
Surprisingly, Cloudflare doesn't force me to complete a CAPTCHA while logging in to manage my domains with them with a third-party VPN enabled. On the other hand, Namecheap doesn't even allow me to log in using that VPN.
I migrated all of my domains away from Namecheap after their support told me that my (non-Namecheap) VPN needed to be disabled before I could log in. Namecheap now sells their own VPN service, so there is some conflict of interest in the VPN restriction.
Cloudflare does not require me to turn off my third-party VPN before logging in, and sells domains at cost (at lower rates than Namecheap). For example, Cloudflare charges $8.03/year for a .com domain ($7.85 Verisign rate + $0.18 ICANN fee), which will go up to $8.39 + whatever the new ICANN fee is after the Verisign/ICANN price hike. Namecheap currently charges $8.88 for the registration year and $12.98 every year after that, with the rates also going up after the price hike. Porkbun also charges less for renewals than Namecheap, and covers TLDs that Cloudflare doesn't.
It sounds like our support was trying to help you troubleshoot a login issue — to say that we “require you to disable VPN” to login so that we can push our own VPN product on you is absolutely false and actually kind of absurd if you know anything about our business.
No, please don't twist my words. Namecheap's support rep told me that Namecheap is rejecting logins from customers using the third-party VPN, and that Namecheap has no plans to allow customers using the third-party VPN to log in. It is relevant to point out that Namecheap is refusing service to customers who use one of Namecheap's competitors. That's a conflict of interest, whether you admit to it or not.
In the end, it's under ICANN's purview and in this case, also allowed by a decision made by the Trump administration in 2018. Verisign has a Cooperative Agreement with the US Government. The gist:
"The amendment repeals Obama-era price controls and provides Verisign the pricing flexibility to change its .com Registry Agreement with ICANN to increase wholesale .com prices. Specifically, the flexibility permits Verisign to pursue with ICANN an up to 7 percent increase in the prices for .com domain names, in each of the last four years of the six-year term of the .com Registry Agreement. The changes also affirm that Verisign may not vertically integrate or operate as a registrar in the .com top level domain."
To add to that, why can they actually? Why doesn't the EU just start a new .com registry that the rest of the world can actually refer to? I don't have a complete understanding of the TLD world but I can imagine it's much like the AS world with BGP. If the rest of world decides that one registry (Verizon's .com registry) isn't the leading authority, but rather the EU's .com registry for example, is. Than what "can" verizon actually do against it? Sure, the internet would break with namesquatting but atleast it's better than paying a ransom.
Domain name registration is not their core business and their feature set is limited, as is their direct support for a lot of TLDs. It works well for a lot of people, which is fine but it is likely a loss-leader for them and treated as a user-acquisition channel.
The markup from legacy registrars is probably excessive, but with Google, Cloudflare, etc getting into the game, they can likely offer wholesale pricing to support the rest of their (very) profitable product lines.
Exactly. Depends how you define legacy registrars but I can agree with you to an extent. Namecheap's retail pricing is not excessive by any means — domains on their own are essentially commoditized — it all depends how much you value service and trust. Try calling Google if your domain is hijacked, your account is locked, or you have any number of other issues with a high value domain.
Yes. Just got off the phone with your support this morning. It made the process so much faster and easier. Instead of spending 3 hours trying to fix it myself and reading countless search results, I got it fixed in 5 minutes. Never, ever would happen with Google or Yahoo.
Others will do it cheaper and make it up with cloud, email, etc services. That’s why we’ve moved away from Namecheap (who were my go-to for many years).
If I’m really worried about domain hijacking, locking, etc I’d use something like MarkMonitor.
> Namecheap's retail pricing is not excessive by any means
$12.98 for a .com domain renewal is a 65% upcharge over the $7.85 wholesale rate. That is considerably more expensive than many of Namecheap's competitors.
