Comment by sourcecodeplz
8 hours ago
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)
8 hours ago
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)
Is there a directory of private equity acquisitions? Maybe even a browser extension that flags the websites of acquired companies.
Such acquisitions are often due to founders cashing out or retiring, and the first thing private equity does is switch gears to "extraction mode". As such, I would think twice before (a) making a long-term commitment to their services, or (b) spending time applying for a job there.
https://www.worseonpurpose.com/
I like this site, but looking at it right now, I'm seeing some obvious Opus 5 era Claudese in here [1]. I'm not sure how much I can trust something written lazily by an LLM, as it means there's no way to know if there's a human in the loop or if someone just has a Hermes agent out there doing automated research and writing it up automatically.
1: https://ledger.worseonpurpose.com/brands/new-balance "Why Approved" section
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To give people a bit of insight into the domain registry industry, when a registrar increase domain prices there are generally four reason why they do it.
1) The registrar want to increase its margins.
2) The registry upstream increased their price. For .com, Verisign agreement with ICANN allow Verisign to increase the price by 7% in each of the final four years of every six-year cycle. As such they increased it in 2024 and will do so again on November 1, 2026.
3) The registrar is not a direct registrar and uses a middle man, and the middle man want to increase its margins.
4) The buyer or the registrar is operating on a different currency than the registry, and the registrar is compensating for changes in the currency valuation.
Thanks for explaining how markets work. Not really a response to the OPs complaint.
Ohhh so that’s why I got those price increases emails. Yay. What are some good alternatives?
I've been very happy with Porkbun. https://porkbun.com
I moved my domains to Porkbun some years ago when Google sold their domain stuff to Squarespace. Absolutely no headaches, and the one time i got double-charged after an API error during checkout, it was solved within 15 minutes with a human. I recommend them a lot.
I enjoy the warning in the footer:
"WARNING: This site has been known to cause a mind blowing experience. We recommend you prepare yourself mentally and if possible be sitting down. Side effects may include saving money, letting out a chuckle, and sporadic oinking."
Domain related: I regret getting a .io domain for my email and website; with the price increases, it's not far from $100/year. I'm looking to move from Namecheap to Porkbun and to move to a .com domain.
Do you know if they support dynamic DNS? I self host most of my stuff and I have a dynamic IP at home
2 replies →
Same here. Recently migrated quite a few domains from Namecheap to Porkbun and it only took a matter of minutes.
Yep I moved all namecheap and godaddy to porkbun.
I also moved over and have been very happy.
Moved over after Gandi’s acquisition by PE and then price hikes. Hope Porkbun stays legit for at least another decade.
And porkbun, a seemingly privately owned company, isn't private equity?
9 replies →
I abuse https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/ as a domain registrar. I really like their astetic(pre pay, simple, no fluff) but it turns out the sort of stuff I want to run on the internet is a poor match for their infrastructure so don't actually use nfsn in their primary web host role.
Wait, you consider that abusive? I have only used NFSN as a registrar for two decades. Always had hosting and DNS managed elsewhere.
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I use nfs as host too. Didn't know they did registrar. Thanks.
Ya every time I installed a slightly involved CMS it was a broken headache for some technical reason, so I gave that up. Made my own superuninvolved CMS and that works fine.
Porkbun. Cloudflare if you don't mind being locked into using them for DNS too.
Id caution against using Cloudflare for DNS. They rewrite your CAA record so multiple other CAs can sign certs on your domains. It's non-obvious unless you query your own CAA record
6 replies →
They were already a sub-par registrar a decade ago, or more. You can find many namecheap horror stories without much trouble. I moved away from them years ago due to various shenanigans and never looked back.
And well, business goes down.
I purchased a domain name from them yesterday, in addition to a few I already had.
This will be the last purchase unless I see some significant traction in the case we're discussing in particular, and company wide in general.
Hope others will do the same. Not punishing this behavior is encouraging such abuse in the entire industry (if Namecheap gets away with that, everyone else will follow).
I remember years and years ago moving all my domains to Namecheap because they were considered "the good guys." I suppose I'm going to have to start looking around once again to see who are currently the good guys.
yep, social approval and good faith will always get you constant business (word of mouth - recommendations).
but "numbers guys" say no, we need squeeze profits short term..
To that end, Network Solutions is still around
IMO Cloudflare is the closest thing to a "good guy" these days. Very customer friendly, affordable and generally fairly ethical (if you pass over the part where they share data with the NSA).
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Damnit. I liked them for their simplicity, lack of bullshit, and cheaq costs. Know any recommended alternatives? (Edit: Nevermind, I see are suggestions elsewhere in this discussion).
I dont have a horse in this race, but it used to main namecheap since all the way back to 2015, support was the best, prices and offerings too, but they really fucked me over a few times, were i did ended up losing a good domain name and then they sniped 2 domain name searches i had locked in but failed to buy... that one is absolutely truthful, if you land on something good you either pay for it or some mysterious squatting entity will get them in matter of hours.
These days I just use Cloudflare and Marcaría for stuff thats not available on Cloudflare. CF may not be the most trustful company out there, but it is nice to have everything in one ecosystem. Plus, you can deploy a site using their workers, so essentially you can go from domain name to website in 5 minutes including ssl and whatever else you can think of, including bot protection and good metrics.
>namecheap purchased by private equity CVC in 2025 for $1.5B
Ahhh crap, there goes the company down the toilet. And they were the place I trusted to buy my domain names from.
Oof, that'll do it.
I'll have to move providers.