Namecheap Seizes and Disables a User's Entire Domain Portfolio

Like I have said previously¹ about choosing a registrar: If you have regular backups, and if some downtime is not really a problem, it might be fine to use web site hosting, e-mail (and in extreme cases even DNS hosting), from some fly-by-night el cheapo provider. But your domain name registrar? Pick them carefully, don’t skimp, and make sure they have good support. Because when things go pear-shaped, you really want to be able to actually talk to someone to change your web server or e-mail DNS records (or even DNS servers) to somewhere else.

Big registrars can’t afford any support costs since they prefer to squeeze the price down as far as possible, and therefore they prefer to simply lose or outright drop any customer in case of any and all problems. Conversely, small registrars may charge more, but have better (i.e. actually existing, and sometimes even dedicated and personal) support for when things go wrong, and have a vested interest in keeping you as a customer.

A small registrar might also be so small as to know you personally, which will help monumentally against any social engineering attacks.

Full disclosure: I work at such a registrar, but you’re probably not in our target market.

1. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32095499>

namecheap purchased by private equity CVC in 2025 for $1.5B

so costs need to go down (-human support + ai automation)

and prices go up (they increased i think .com 3 times this year alone)

Yea they did something like this with us. Fully turned off our business domain because we didn’t reply to a phishing email in 48 hours. We migrated out the next day once we got it resolved. It took over 6 hours from when we noticed the issue and responded until they turned it back on. Absolutely horrible service.

Namecheap is the worst! Our CTO left and our account was tied to his phone. Our CEO didn't want to talk to him, so, over chat, I made them remove the phone 2FA. They didn't authenticate me in any way - only gave them a good story and our username. I know people trash talk GoDaddy, but I've been the most happiest with them - they have support, if you have lots of domains, they assign to your an account exec that can do stuff for you. I've dealt with literally all registrars as I own thousands of domains. Nobody else comes close to GoDaddy - they have APIs, they have support, they listen. Plus, they are big and you can sue them - try suing company abroad if they mess up!

As far as I recall, Namecheap was based in Eastern Europe - as an Eastern European, I can tell you that I would never put anything important in an Eastern European company! Their new Spaceship offshoot is lipstick on a pig, literally.

Cloudflare is also not a good choice - you have no support! Porkbun may seem cool, but I'm not impressed as they lack some basic features such as profiles, let's say.

After seeing one of these a few years back I started moving everything. I decided to look for a local provider (UK) in the end and landed with https://www.mythic-beasts.com/ and couldn't be happier. The one issue I've ever had was answered by a human within the hour.

I'm done cheaping out on critical stuff now, especially the domain registrar.

I had a similar experience with Namecheap. Their bot crawled my website while it was still under construction and apparently reported it to some security databases, causing my domain to be flagged as suspicious.

Since then, my domain's reputation has been affected, and I often get security warnings when trying to access my own website through my company's VPN.

Namecheap simply informed me that it had been a mistake, but the damage was already done, and the issue still persists.

There's a reason it's called Namecheap not Namesafe.

They’ve been bought by PE, so expect worse.

Same thing that’s happening with BitWarden.

I just moved my email domain off to PorkBun.

Move NOW before it becomes a problem. It WILL knock on your door too. Talking from experience, had my whole very small one-man business shutdown over night by Site5 (hosting) when I was a student, sent me into debt trying to keep my customers, and I had to shut it down.

Move off of the companies that obviously don’t care to the ones that might care a little bit (no guarantees this doesn’t happen to porkbun either though).

Out of curiosity where are people going for their domains. I have a GoDaddy because changing seems like a task that would be more annoying than it is worth and that is even if you can find a place that is better.