DNS registrar recommendations?

[cos]

Looking for a place to transfer my domain registrations to.

Years ago I transferred most of my domain registrations to Google Domains, because I had already transferred my DNS zones from my own nameservers to Google Cloud DNS, and it's been convenient to have the domain registrations in the same system. But Google Domains is moving everyone to Squarespace and shutting their domain registration service down, so I will no longer have that advantage, and might as well look around. I could stay with Squarespace, but no particular reason to.

Google Domains charges $12/year/domain for all of my .com, .org, and .net domains; most other places seem to charge more like $24+/year. Friends and coworkers have suggested a couple of places that don't charge more than Google - namecheap and porkbun.

If you have any domains, what do you use and recommend, and why?

I'm not looking for other services, like hosting my email, or web sites, or primary DNS. Just domain registration. It's okay if the same company provides those other services, but if they expect most of their users to combine a domain registration with other stuff like that, that may be a drawback because their user interface may make it easy to accidentally have it take over my primary DNS without me intending to, or just be annoying to deal with.

Comments

[macthud]

I've only heard good things about, but not yet used myself, nearlyfreespeech.net. I almost went there a few years ago when I wound up on Google Domains.

Looks like Squarespace will nearly double my registrar costs in a year, and that will be sufficient to make me move, probably to NearlyFreeSpeech.

Re: DNS registrar recommendations?

[cos]

Huh, that's one I hadn't heard of. Thanks.

[nacht_musik]

I've been on Namecheap since mid-2020, no complaints, but I'm not actually using the domain for anything yet so maybe that's not a useful recommendation. But at least the transfer/billing/renewal process has been fine.

[jered]

Namecheap here too. They seem to have good security practices, and were not evil when I last checked on this.

[flexagon]

I use godaddy, but for literally no reason other than they were around 15 years ago when I wanted to register a domain. That said, I've had good experiences with their customer service etc.

Re: DNS registrar recommendations?

[cos]

15 years ago I had all my domains at netwiz, which was the first place I transferred things to after NSI's monopoly ended in 1999. But I had to work with GoDaddy for several of my web site clients when I was contracting to do web sites around 2004-2008, and my experiences with them gave me probably a lifelong distaste for that company :( It got to the point that I said I would not take on work for anyone who had registered their domain with GoDaddy unless they were willing to let me transfer it elsewhere as the first thing I did. Extreme technical incompetence, and scattered & confusing user interface, among other things, though I don't remember if their tech support / customer service was good or bad. Glad to hear they haven't been troublesome for you!